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I pretty much follow the same system the first poster shows for my 150 or so cookbooks:  baking, region, etc. and it has made finding the cookbook I want much faster once I rearranged them in this manner several years ago.  Luckily my bookshelves are able to accomodate any size cookbook I have so I don't have to worry about not being able to fit the large French cookbook in with the rest of the French cookbooks.  But I also have a large collection of cooking magazines (Bon Appetit, Cooks Illustrated, Cooking Light, Food & Wine and Saveur are the main ones) that date back 20-25 years and several years ago I purchased a special large glass-doored bookcase from Ikea that allowed me to sort all my magazines in stacks by month.  Even though many recipes are online I found early on that not all of them are so if I were to get rid of the magazines I would lose many favorite recipes.  I also like to read the articles and look at the photos for whatever month is appropriate.  For example, I love to grab a stack of old Octobers and browse through them for ideas of what to do with the produce is available right now.  Many times I find an old issue with recipes that I wouldn't have attempted 20 years ago that I am ready to head straight into the kitchen and start cooking today.  There are so many gems in the old issues that I can't bear to part with them and having them sorted by month have made using them a real joy.  Also sorting them by month makes finding the exact issue I am looking for after I find a recipe on EYB a breeze. 

That's a genius idea about the magazines, hillsboroks; I'm going to re-sort my Cook's Illustrated by month tonight. Even though I only have a few years' worth, it'll definitely make it easier to retrieve the one I want. And I do find I'm using them a lot more with EYB: even if I don't think I'll necessarily use the CI recipe, there's often something worth knowing in the accompanying article when I'm reading around from several different sources to synthesize a recipe.

I am same with magazines - all chronological since I started subscribing to them.  I would never part with them until death.  I need to check out Ikea bookcase you mentioned.  My Bon Appetit and Gourmet are the longest ones followed by Food and Wine and Saveur. 

Shelf 1- Picnics and Teaparites, Celebrity Chefts, Presidential Books/Picture Books, Soups Stews, Breakfasts

Shelf 2-Food for Fifty/Large Quantity, Italian

Shelf 3- Desserts, Wine

Shelf 4-Asian, Chinese, Indian, Japanese, Thai, Mexican

Shelf 5-American, French, European, Polish, Jewish

Shelf 6-Entertaining

Shelf 7- Vegetarian

My six cookbooks are all on the shelf underneath my microwave. I don't have very many: The America's Test Kitchen Family Cookbook, Cooking for Two 2009, King Arthur Flour Whole Grain Baking, The Mixer Bible, Barefoot in Paris, Ben & Jerry's, and my newest Ball Bluebook Guide to Preserving (unread).  I also have a big binder full of recipes, seven issues of Cook's Country, and nine issues of Cook's Illustrated.  Even with this small collection, eat your books is incredibly helpful.  And, believe it or not, I still have a TON of recipes in my own cookbooks that I want to make.  Just from my own small recipe collection, not counting recipes that I've made and don't want to repeat again or the canning book, I have 2,771 recipes to choose from (including 1,016 "favorites" that I've already made and like).  I like the idea of cooking my way through my own cookbooks.   I figure that, taking into account the recipes that I've made and won't be repeating, I'm almost half-way through!  And since I've been cooking actively for about five years, it will probably take another five years to cook through the second half of my cookbooks :)  Er, except for all the grilling recipes, since we don't have a grill :)

I do a mish-mash of those methods. My favorite authors have all books grouped together on the most accessible shelves no matter the topic - Nigel Slater, Ottolenghi, Nigella Lawson, Diana Henry, Melissa Clark, Jamie Oliver, Dorie Greenspan. Then everything else is shelved by topic:

Country then region within country
Baking/desserts then topic within - cookies, cakes, ice cream, chocolate, pastry/pies, bread, fruit
Restaurants/chefs filed by name of restaurant or chef (depends which is more prominent in my mind!)
Vegetables - vegetarian, vegan, vegetables, salads
Single topic - meat, fish, yoghurt, soup, polenta, cheese, etc
Entertaining/parties - includes picnics and occasion cooking such as Christmas
General - this is everything else that doesn't have a theme. These are filed by author name.

The only problem I have is when a book falls into two subjects - Italian vegetables, French baking, etc. With almost 2,000 books (which I keep saying I am going to purge, helped by Jenny's great post on the topic) I do need a good system or I would never find anything.

E_Ballad: Congratulations on your new bookshelves! Have fun reorganizing. Are you more likely to think "I want to cook a recipe by Claudia Roden" or "I want to cook a Spanish recipe"?  (I have one of her books, "The food of Spain".) The shelve the books by either author's name or ethnicity/food type. I think the best organization system is the one that corresponds to how you think.

My own books are organized by: cooking method books (slow cooker, grilling), food type (meat, vegetables, dairy), meal course (breakfast, soup, salad), American by region (east to west), European, then Latin American, Asian (all by country). Then dessert (by food type: general, cakes, pies, cookies, etc.; by ingredient: chocolate, general fruit, specific fruits; by ethnicity). 

I had to re-organize my cookbooks a bit last week when I got some new ones, and got rid of some old ones. So many here recommend sorting by author, I sort my reading books by author, so why not? I decided to give it a go and sorted all of my cookbooks by author. That sort lasted for less than 24 hours before I became too frustrated when I couldn't find the books I wanted without going to my computer to look up the author's name, and changed back to my old method. I have a few cookbooks by some famous authors, but that's not the bulk of my books, and I don't know the authors by heart on most - I know the titles and the subject matter, besides, it looked messy to me (I know, I know...).

I sort my indexed books in sections - Reference (no recipes), encyclopedic general (Joy of Cooking type), general (Food from Plenty and the like go here), sauces, cooking methods (rice cooker, pressure cooker, roasting...), preserving and fermenting, ethnic and regional, baking (breads), grains and legumes, dairy, meat, vegetables, fruits, entertaining, beverages, cooking ahead, desserts. The ordering may seem bizarre, but part of it is keeping the type of books I use most at or near eye level, the lesser used categories get lower shelves.

I have my un-indexed books sorted the same way, but on separate shelves. I keep them straight by having a little green label at the base of the spine on each indexed book. I know that I can search the indexed ones on EYB, and keep the un-indexed ones separate because they need to be searched manually. I separated them soon after I joined EYB, then I decided to integrate them, with this latest re-org I'm back to keeping them separate.

Each topic section of books is sorted by size, not height, but depth, for a clean, organized look. My "library hall" of built-in bookcases is right off my foyer so I like to keep the shelves looking nice. Sorting by size also helps define each topic section.

E_Ballad: I am afraid I am also guilty of rehashing one or two old chestnuts haha, sorry, for me everything is new and interesting around here. I will try to restrain me doing so.

My cook books are not ordered yet, I am not supposed to be adding more, because of lack of space among other reasons, but I do, I smuggle them into the house and cram them wherever they can go more easily unnoticed for the rest of the inhabitants of this house, which is kind of useless since I already own around 200. The only books that are correctly ordered are the ones about art, literature and theatre through registering them in an Excel sheet by author, title, publisher/translator and assigning them a number which we also stick to the book library style. In that way you just have to press Ctrl+F or filter them in the xls sheet to find the number. If I were to order my cook books someday I will probably combine this method and the one of ordering them physically by sections described by anightowl.

I'm one of those whose cookbooks have certainly doubled or more in the last six years (since I posted in this thread). I'm up to 135.  My EYB Bookshelf is several times that, because I use it for wishlists, library-available cookbooks, topics of interest, etc. 

With the growth, my storing/organizing system has changed a bit.

Main kitchen shelf:  core favorites (Joy, Doubleday, Veg Eps, Veg Cooking for Everyone, Waters, Victory Garden, Silver Palate, Herbfarm, a few others)

Lower kitchen shelves:  cuisines (most-used); specialist (baking, barbecue, etc.)

Sitting room:   cuisines (less used than kitchen); specialist (less used than kitchen); American regional; reference

On the cuisines shelves, the books are grouped by cuisine and the cuisines grouped roughly regionally.  Magazines (about 40) are also in the sitting room, organized by date.  Since joining EYB I've bought very few, but used the ones already here much, much more often than I did before.

For those who need to shelve by size to conserve space: Might EYB bookmarks be helpful in laying your hands on a given book quickly?  That is, you'd create a bookmark for each shelf/location, and assign each of your books to its shelf bookmark.  Maybe not worth the effort if you have many many books and shelves, at least until such time as it's possible to mass-bookmark (assigning multiple books to a given bookmark at once).

Having just recently donated some and reorganized the remaining (about 700), here are my loose categories:

General

Specific Diet

Healthy Eating

Bread

Baking

Vegetables

Vegetarian

Soup

Pressure Cooker

Slow Cooker

Grilling/BBQ/Smoking

Ethnic by Country (these take up one whole floor-to-ceiling bookshelf)

American/Texas (I live in San Antonio so lots of Texas books)

Christmas

Single Topic (Breakfast, Beans, Potatoes, Rice, Eggs, Pasta, Chicken, etc.)

Community Cookbooks

About Food/Food Reading/Reference

It is so wonderful to see that other members suffer from the same "too little space, too many coobooks" problem and have also resorted to the "I organize them based on which shelves they fit on" system. My 400+ books are therefore organized by current usage, with the ones I use the most in the kitchen on a shelf that can fit about 15, depending on thickness, and that thankfully accepts all heights. After that, I put my favorites in the easiest to reach shelves in our living area closest to the kitchen, if they fit. There are shelves of various sizes around this one large room (the only room besides the kitchen, bathrooms and bedrooms). The least used ones are relegated to the guestroom-cum-library where they vie for space with fiction and non-fiction books on two walls of shelves. Though, thanks to EYB, when I search for recipes containing certain ingredients, I am often directed to cookbooks on these "least used" shelves and find myself re-evaluating them. In the same way, I thought I'd put some rarely used (pre EYB) cookbooks in the attic space we can access with a stepladder. But then when I searched EYB for recipes containing certain ingredients, one of those books kept popping up in the results, so I learned my lesson.

Fortunately, I have a good visual memory, so unless I've moved the books recently, I can usually visualize the last place I saw the book I seek. And if I remember what it looks like, I at least know it is on one of the "short" or "tall" shelves, unless it is in a stack, then all bets are off. So I do sometimes find myself wandering around in search of a book that is not where I thought it was! 

If I ever have the luxury of a shelving system that accommodates all book sizes, I think I would like to follow a system somewhat like the one PennyG has described, except for the "most frequently used" shelf in the kitchen.

Ok, I have nowhere near 1900 cookbooks (thanks god, I would never know where to put them or how to use them all!), but what I do is :

- Magazines by English or French (I mean the language of the magazine, I am French living in the UK and frequently going back), and by Season (Autumn, Winter, Spring, Summer), because if I am looking to use courgettes, or for a barbeque recipe, I will look in summer for instance (not all magazines are indexed)

- Books by English or French (language) and by type of cooking/country (French, English, Italian, Asia...)

Cuisine/Geographically, with neighboring cuisines near each other, which is challenging as geography isn't linear but bookshelves are -- more or less. :-) 

Nothing alphabetized, though multiple books by the same author are grouped together unless they are in radically different cuisines (e.g. Naomi Duguid's books, which are all over the place). I have about 350 books - a good sized collection, but not yet over-running the house. I did reorganize recently because my Asian section outgrew its space and had to move.

One section goes roughly east to west from Japan to India: Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Macanese, Indonesian, Malaysian, Vietnamese, Thai, Burmese, Nepalese, Indian, Sri Lankan, Pan-Asia books. This covers about 50% of my collection.

Second section covers general western (e.g. Joy of Cooking, Bittman, etc.), then roughly west to east this time: Portugese, Spanish, Northwest Med/Southest France, French, Italian, back to Morocco and general North African, Middle Eastern, Turkish, Persian, up to Russia, and finally Central Asian.

Non-Mediterranean Africa: Senegal, Ghana, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, South Africa, Pan-African books.

Americas: Native American, regional US (e.g. Southern), Mexican, a few cookbooks for South American cuisines, Caribbean

Baking shelf

Oversized shelf, including my binders of hand-written, printed, and magazine recipe cut-outs

Third section is miscellaneous: preserving/canning books, those church and community cookbooks, a few random general cookbooks that I don't use often, food companion/ingredient encyclopedias, tips & tricks books, odd books like Salvador Dali's cookbook, Alinea, Modernist, and really old cookbooks.

Forth section: food history, culture

Magazines are organized by publication and date in magazine shelving boxes.

I mostly organize by category. and then by author. I have a top bit on the bookshelf with frequently used.