I'm a retired librarian. When my sister lost her battle with colon cancer in 2001, she had over 2500 quilt books. The 1st thing I did was put them in order "alphabetically" by "title". That's the easiest way to find a particular book. Don't count "A", or "The" if it's the 1st word of title. Having books in order also helps eliminate purchasing duplicates. I then made a computer list with the basics - author, title, publisher, & copyright date. Once you have a computer list, you can easily find books by a particular author by doing a key word seardh in the document.