When I was a child, I once knocked every book off every shelf in the house.
Because I had 6 books in alphabetical order on my little shelf in my room. My mother kept rearranging them in as close a rainbow distribution as possible.. I asked her to stop many times, but ultimately decided if you're going to mess up my shelf, I will mess up yours.
Surprisingly this tactic worked, and they didn't make me clean up the books by myself, they did most of it.
Their idea of "organizing" the books is "well most of the books in that series are close to each other, but a bunch of other random ones are mixed in, and entire genres have been rearranged many times so who knows what books we even actually have"
They have a similar way of organizing dvds. It's infuriating.
I was in a similar situation. It was the only time I got into a serious fight with my mom. The only difference was that I was an adult already, had around 1800 books, and sorted them by genre, author and series order.
It looks like a charity shop that I would see around here. They also organise clothes by colour which makes more sense but still, I'm only looking for my size and in a charity shop the clothes are all random so availability is more important.
It took me a while to figure out what you were talking about. That's not even supposed to be there. That's my daughter's. I have no idea why she decided to put it there apart from the aforementioned "fuck it."
I've never seen a place selling books not have them organized alphabetically! They might not be libraries but they have an interest in their customers being able to find what they're looking for
I don't get what you mean by this. Customers can go into both looking for something specific or seek out a particular author. If there's no logical ordering how can customers find what they're looking for?
My wife does this to our books and it drives me nuts.
"Where's The Art of War?"
"It's in the black section"
One year her mom and I reordered them by author last name while she was away on a work trip. Took her 5 seconds upon returning home to notice it was different and she was furious.
Put yourself in her shoes. If she derives joy from a colorful sorting of the books, it's likely any other sorting would cause some annoyance/anguish (however minor). She would feel this way each time she laid eyes on the bookshelf.
On the other hand, a colorful sorting would only negatively affect you when you are actively looking for a book. I'm guessing that's far less often than she merely looks at the bookshelf.
A compromise could be that she sorts the books by color and then by authors name. Not the most efficient sorting method for finding books, but would save a considerable amount of time compared to no author name sorting at all.
Edit: alternatively, a quick Google image search of the book name would tell you all you need to know to quickly find it in a colorful sorting.