How To Organize Cookbooks: Cookbook Organization Ideas With Images

I’m Jessica Nunemaker and I am a rebel cookbook lover — just ask my cookbook collection. Remember how you were taught to handle books? Treat books like a little baby. Be gentle with them and use a bookmark. Oh, and never ever write in them.

Not only do I use my cookbooks with messy, flour-covered hands, I spill and splatter them. Small tab-style sticky notes mark pages. I dog-ear well-written passages, and (horrors) I even write in my cookbooks. All. The. Time.

Read below to learn how to organize your collection of cookbooks so they work for you. If there’s a Super Bowl party and you need to bring a plate of fudgy brownies or you’re about to do a little meal planning, you can find what you want, when you want it.

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Arranging Cookbooks

Some of us don’t have the luxury of space, the volume of books, or the desire to own more than a few cookbooks. We get a single small shelf to house our cookbooks. There isn’t a need for fancy pants organizing. It’s easy to keep tabs on our collection of cookbooks and it’s enough.

For everyone else, there is a method to the madness or, at least, several methods to the madness that is otherwise known as whipping a useful thing into usable shape.

Have fun with it.

When it comes to moving books around during a home improvement renovation to putting books above the kitchen cabinet to my (favorite) rainbow array on open shelves or stacked on my home office floor out of necessity, this cookbook collector has dealt with space issues and accessibility troubles galore.

I’ve been there. I have had all the space in the world for my books and also very little room. I’ve had a collection of cookbooks for a long time (and I want to be able to use them).

So, who better to throw ideas out there on how you can better tackle your own cookbook collection so you can access your books when you want (with ease)?

Dear Cookbook Lover: Consider Your Space and Needs

My cookbook storage space changed seven times from 2018 to the present (2024). From buying and selling houses around Indiana to moving to Pennsylvania and into a space with a library, and then two more moves (hello, divorce) until (another move) I closed on my house, I’ve struggled with how to make sense of my cookbook collection on more than one occasion.

Don’t even get me started on loose recipes or the random recipe card that makes its way out of my recipe binder. We will delve into organizing recipes and the chunky recipe binder in a different article. Those are different animals.

But for your collection of cookbooks, stick with one style or use several. Always consider how you do what you do. Seriously. Take a second and think back to the last two weeks or three weeks or a whole month of meals. How do you use your books? What do you want to change?

• What cookbooks did you use?
• Could you find your favorite cookbook when you needed it?
• Did you have trouble reaching a treasured cookbook you wanted because it was too high up or too low to the floor?
• Did you cook a certain type of food more than another?
• Do you use a particular ingredient or stick to a certain diet, such as Keto, gluten-free, or the Mediterranean diet and have specific titles?
• Are you using the same books on repeat (and are you okay with that)?
• Are you reaching for the same cookbook authors?
• Do you use your books for meal planning, home decor, or both?
• What kind of storage space do you have for your cookbooks?
• Is there a creative option you’ve overlooked, such as above your kitchen cabinets or filtered in on a floating shelf?

If you use the same five cookbook titles, can you move them out of a prime location to give other books a chance? You already know you have a collection of Chuck Williams cookbooks. Do you need them front and center? How well do you know your recipe collection by sight?

Many years ago, when I began writing this article, I rearranged my built-in kitchen bookshelves to reflect different ways of organizing cookbooks.

Although that was a couple of house sales ago, I decided to keep the examples.

I think it makes a great visual, to see how you can display books and how it looks on the same set of shelves.

Jessica Nunemaker, Little Indiana Bakes

My loose recipes are tricky. Depending on my storage space, I’ve either tacked up my favorite recipes (often a handwritten family recipe) on corkboards, taped favorite recipes of a particular theme inside a kitchen cabinet (such as beverage recipes in the kitchen cabinet where I kept wine glasses) but where I could still see the recipe name.

I’ve set my recipe card assortment in a little used trifle bowl in my China cabinet, or carefully arranged in page protectors in a recipe binder. 

We’ll go over how to organize those loose recipes and newspaper clippings (beyond the recipe box) and the odd custom cookbook in a different article.

For now, let’s take a look at the different ways you can style one bookshelf.

Organize Cookbooks By Color

Some naysayers believe color-coding cookbooks is best left for home decorators. These people assert that true cooks and home bakers would never color code cookbooks.

I say, “Nay!”

It may seem counter-intuitive or a chore, but I enjoy organizing my cookbooks by color. After the first massive reorganization by color, any new additions only take a second to add in. I use the colors on the spine. The dominant color wins. Remembering the book cover and spine color takes less time than you’d think.

Like you, I generally know the colors of my favorite cookbooks because I use my cookbooks. I read them like a book book. Learning the book cover and spine color takes less time than you’d think.

It doesn’t take me long to find what I need and it’s easy to direct a family member to a particular cookbook based on color. I can say “Red, on the far left.”

My shelves are no longer a mishmash of random cookbooks that fit in here or there. I know the book colors of my favorites and quickly learn the color of a new cookbook.

The similar color groupings appeal to me and leave me far more likely to pick up something unexpected, flip through it, and bake from it.

Jessica Nunemaker, Little Indiana Bakes

Light to dark or dark to light; it doesn’t matter. You don’t have to stick to the typical red, orange, yellow, green, blue, pink, and purple of a rainbow either. Don’t stress about it. This is your house, your collection. There’s going to be overlap in places so you get to decide what’s aesthetically pleasing to your eye.

I have many cookbooks, so I used to switch them out as the mood struck so every book had a chance at getting used. I kept it fresh, yo.

It was also a boost to my home decor. Grouping cheery colors looks good. It made me want to paw through my cookbooks and helped keep them from looking like a cluttered mess. I consider that a win.

Not your thing? No problem. There are plenty of other ways to make sense of your collection. Keep on scrolling and you’ll see other ways to use your books in your home decor.

Organize Cookbooks by Author

If you are anything like me, when you find a cookbook author you love, you want everything by that person. Organizing by author is a great choice for people who tend to collect and use cookbooks created by the same writers.

If you have several cookbooks by a well-known author, group those together. If you have multiple cookbooks by a not so well-known author, you can group those too.

Then? Arrange the rest of your cookbooks by author or alphabetically by title. Or whatever else your heart desires.

Organize Cookbooks by Cuisine, Country, or Region

Think about your books, cookbook collector. Do you tend to have a very specific collection, such as cookbooks from the places you’ve visited or those that call to mind your childhood in the Midwest or reflect your current life in the New England States?

Perhaps your cookbooks highlight French cooking, Scandinavian baking, and Pennsylvania Dutch cooking.

If you are prone to baking or cooking by cuisine, then you may want to organize your cookbooks to reflect your preferences.

Group together your Italian cookbooks, your dessert cookbooks, your Amish cookbooks, Vietnamese, Japanese, Irish, American, food truck, grilling, and cocktail cookbooks.

Grab your general cookbooks and place them together. Don’t forget about the cookbooks focusing on special diets like Keto or Paleo, or those canning and preserving cookbooks you are definitely, almost absolutely, probably maybe going to crack open this summer.

If you have any overlaps, sort the cookbook by what you would use the most or as a part of a secondary general grouping.

The next time you reach for your favorite Thai cookbook, you may instead decide to try out a recipe from one of your other Thai cookbooks — because you finally know where it is.

You can divvy up those cookbooks from larger areas, such as American, and then further within those groupings, like Southern, Midwest, and Northwest, if you want. If you frequently cook and bake location-specific, this sorting method may be your fave.

Organize Cookbooks by Favorites

No longer will you hunt through shelves searching for your precious. You can keep the most important books in your collection in an easy to access locale.

Let’s reverse that thinking. Instead of putting the cookbooks you use the most within easy reach, what if you moved those cookbooks to the bottom or top shelves or to the shelving of a different room?

As long as you don’t have mobility issues, it may help spur you to try out your neglected cookbooks. They are begging for your attention.

Organize Cookbooks by Seasonal Rotation (Great for Baking and Cooking Magazines)

Our weather varies from day to day (and hour to hour, I swear). Even though it can snow one day and hit 60* the next, I tend to bake and cook by the season (and I expect you do too). For specific collections, or so many books you need a way to bring new ones to your attention, sorting cookbooks by season might help you out.

Even if organizing books by the season isn’t a good fit for your cookbooks, it is a fantastic way to store cooking and baking magazines. Those baking and cooking magazines run seasonally so the hard part of sorting them is done with a glance at the cover.

If you see pumpkins on the cover then you know it means fall. Soups? Winter. Asparagus? It’s all about spring. The seasons may change but cooking magazines and the themed content inside their glossy covers don’t.

Do you want to mix up your baking and cooking game? Add a few seasonal-feeling titles to your “favorites” area or whatever bookshelf you access the most.

• Spring & Summer: Think spring vegetables and fruits like asparagus, rhubarb, and greens plus more substantial fare like lamb and fish. Add in muffins and portable snacks. Cookbooks featuring strawberries, berries of all kinds, peaches, and plums would be great right about now. Include outdoor and barbecue grilling. Think: sheet cakes and cold puddings and mousse and no-oven items. Cold soups.

• Fall & Winter: Pumpkins and other squashes, those heavier pastas, hearty soups and stews, breads, stews, and pies. How about game meats? Now would be a good time to add in your canning companion cookbooks. Heavier baked items. Turnips, parsnips, rutabagas, beets, and cranberries are but a few cool weather lovers.

Organize your cookbooks and cooking magazines by the season, so you can not only have easy access to your seasonal favorites (and a constant reminder of them), but so you might actually make something from a fruit-specific cookbook you never seem to remember until it’s too late.

Incorporate Cookbooks into Your Home Décor

If your cookbooks laugh at your piddly kitchen shelf as they take the whole thing over, you may need another solution. Make your cookbooks more than functional.

Decorate your kitchen with them.

In our first house, I had a shelf built into the wall in the kitchen. It was perfect for placing my cookbooks. I had a built-in cabinet then too, but my collection wasn’t quite as large, and the cabinet worked well for my mixing bowls and glassware.

As you can see in the image I shared above, I had extra cookbook storage hiding in plain sight. Stacking colorful cookbook spines together made it easy to help reduce the piles of books on the floor (see a different image above) and have easier access. It added a nice pop of color to the small kitchen too.

Now those are kitchen cookbook storage ideas you can use.

Fast forward, and yes, I have the same problem as you. Where do I put these things so I can still reach them? Grabbing a chair or step ladder (or asking one of my tall sons if they happen to be nearby) each time I need a book is a pain. What will I do when my oldest heads off to college next year? I kid, of course. But there are solutions.

Decorators have the answer. The Houzz slideshow belong may help get your wheels spinning.

How to Decorate Your Kitchen With Cookbooks

As you can see above, if you have the inclination, you can do more than the simple standalone bookshelf to hold your cookbooks.

The following websites contain excellent ideas to stylishly display cookbook collections, whether it’s because they are visually appealing or you want to keep your favorite cookbooks handy.

• 10 Stylish Cookbook Display and Storage Ideas
• 15 Unique Kitchen Ideas for Storing Cookbooks
• 20 Creative Ways to Store Books in Your Kitchen
• How to Decorate Your Kitchen With Cookbooks
• Simple Ways to Store Your Cookbooks

After all, what’s the point of having cookbooks if they are boxed up and unreachable?

Rehome Your Cookbooks

Are you moving around cookbooks you don’t care about? Do you have boxes of cookbooks you can’t even get to and sometimes, just sometimes, forget you even have them?

You know the ones.

They contain recipes using a list of ingredients so froufrou you either can’t find them or you’ll have to sell your left kidney to afford it. Or maybe the recipes are too basic or too advanced or just not you anymore. These cookbooks may have been a gift, but if it doesn’t “spark joy” for you (as my BFF Marie Kondo* would say) then why keep it? *We aren’t actually BFFs.

Hanging onto something for no reason is … well, silly. There are always new cookbooks coming out — cookbooks that fit you and the way you bake and cook, not the way you tell yourself you will bake and cook but never do.

Cookbooks that will be your new BFF.

Why not make room for your next new favorite thing or so you can better appreciate those you do already own Give your book to a friend who would find value in it, donate it to your local library, Goodwill or other community thrift store, or send it to me.

Having trouble deciding if a book should stay or if it should go? Maybe you need a different way of thinking about it:

“I envisioned the words being trapped in shelves inside my house.

These went to my library’s used book sale, and releasing them out into the world so others could enjoy them felt powerful.”

Stephanie Vozza, What Happened When I Got Rid Of Everything In My House That Doesn’t Spark Joy, Fast Company, July 25, 2016.

Let go of the guilt. If it’s not for you, it’s not for you.

There is someone out there who will appreciate it. Give that cookbook a chance to be spattered and speckled and dusted with flour. You know, loved.

Multiple Cookbook Storage Ideas for Multiple Reasons

Just as there is more than one way to cook an egg, so too are there many ways to store cookbooks.

You may use a variety of methods to store your books. You could even go by height. It’s how you wanted shelves to look in your elementary school library. Now, you can forget all about the Dewey Decimal System and sort your books your way.

See? There are many ways to do this.

Use one method or a combination, dividing your books by type, then taking the remaining and sorting them by country and region.

The only guide to follow is that it must make sense to you. As long as you know what’s what, then anything goes. There are no wrong answers here. Well, save for one. A (dippy) trend features turning books with the spine to the wall so only the blank pages show. While I’ve seen the trend began due to copyright concerns, I’m not entirely convinced.

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Um, no. My brain can’t wrap my head around this one.

• Staging a home? Yes (a grudging yes).
• Living in a home with backward book spines? Yuck.

If I visit your house, I will peruse your bookshelf. It’s a clue into You. What books have we both read? What do you have that I *also* love? What surprises me? It’s fun. Books are a conversation starter. Do people apply this approach to a kitchen, turning books with their spines facing out? I can’t imagine — so I’m sure someone, somewhere does.

It’s a minimalist movement, a trend, a strange home decor quirk. I’ve had an uncluttered kitchen before, when I didn’t own a potato masher or a pastry blender, now nicknamed “Wolverine claws” in my house. It was a period of time I call “being a young adult” and “broke as a joke.”

Cook the book. Use it. Like it. Love it. Don’t let it sit there like yesterday’s dishes or that pair of pants you bought and now regret.

Your Books, Your Way

There are many different ways to break it down. Consider the options below to remind you of the multitude of ways you can tackle this project.

• Country and Region and Ethnicity or Culture
• Tall and Short
• Celebrity Chefs
• About Food
• Outdoor Cooking and Grilling
• Baking
• Type
• Specialized Cookbooks (such as Christmas cookie cookbooks)
• Vintage Cookbooks
• General Cookbooks
• Famous Authors
• Cookbook Editors (such as Nell Beaubien Nichols)
• Usefulness
• Series Cookbooks

There are cookbooks with book covers so fantastic (or chock full of favorite recipes), I want to see them all the time. To display cookbooks, use a simple book holder. In my current small kitchen, I filter in an old recipe book here and there among the shelves of my kitchen hutch and the open kitchen cabinet.

In past houses, I made use of the shelves in my kitchen island. It was a great cookbook storage idea and helped make meal planning easy. Since I’m a fan of bright and bold colors, any book cover that featured fun, whimsical design upped my kitchen decor 100-fold.

Dig in. Do you have a different method or a combination of methods to help keep things straight? I’d love to hear it.