Books on books - the bad kind

I've been cleaning up the bookcases for a few weeks now and everything is in pretty good order. Unfortunately, we have found a few books out of place, and when I went to put them in their proper places there was no room, so they ended up on top of other books. It's very messy-looking and not good for finding what we need when we need it.

See this bookcase? It holds most of the biographies we own. See the books stored horizontally on top of the books neatly shelved vertically? This drives me crazy!

(Aside for Jeannine: Gratuitous close-ups of some biography titles below.)

Although I have a couple of small empty bookcases, I have no place to put them. When I went through all the books we use for homeschooling two weeks ago and got rid of seven boxes of books, I'd thought we would have plenty of shelf space for our remaining books. I guess I was wrong. Since we have all our history, biography, geography, and social studies books in the living room, I'd like to keep these "extra" biographies there, too. After reading Donna's homeschooling meme at Quiet Life I realized that we had the same set of books we'd rarely, if ever, used.

See the shelf of blue books?

They are The Annals of America, which I bought about eight years ago or so, and which we have used maybe once. And when I say "used" I mean someone pulled a volume from the shelf, opened it, and briefly read a page or two. And I think I was the someone who did that. None of the children has a clear memory of having even touched one of these books.

So I will get rid of these books, and put all the Childhood of Famous Americans on this shelf and see if that alleviates our space issues. I hate having some biographies away from the other biographies, but at least they will be at a level where Marley, and later Sam, will be able to see them easily. And they'll still be in the living room.