Please make it just stop!  

My statement
Was not meant to be taken in literal/technical terms, but you just gave a perfect example of its sentiment.
"I seem to be able to see a color and remember it quite precisely when I am shopping for things of matching hues and tones. My husband is lucky if he can tell the difference between dark brown, deep navy and black."

The Penguin
scenario aside
I still recognise my reference books by colour and design
I know my Taschen 50s book (for example) is pale blue, and that Taschen made each era/ decade a different colour for a reason
Design books appeal to the more visually aware, so colour is surely important ?
[edit] having read Olive's post, I guess we are similar and retain colour information well, but I would still question why some people here think publishers deem it neccessary to use colour at all if it so unimportant, and content is king ?

How do you color-coordinators handle those pesky
multicolor book spines-- lob them in the trash on the grounds that they don't "harmonize"?

Oh
I'm not quite that bad..
But it really boils down to packaging, surely..and the recognition factor?
Coca Cola aren't turning blue overnight, and there's a reason for that- and degrees to that reasoning.
On a personal level, I have 2 homes and several bookcases, so can differentiate between 'subjects' like that..

I certainly see the merits...
I certainly see the merits of color organization. A similar conformity can be found with records. While most collectors I know don't organize by label (including myself), doing so can produce a coherent uniformity. Case in point...the Impulse label. The spine is consistently 1/2 orange 1/2 black. Line up 200 on a shelf and it looks wonderfully dynamic.

Well if we want the most memorizable sense
we should organize our books by smell. That's the most memory provoking of our 5 senses.
Imagine smell filing...'Gone with the Wind' would smell smoky, I'd assume. 'Smilla's Sense of Snow', well that one's obvious. Goeorge Nelson's 'How to See'....for some reason I imagine pencil shavings for that one.

"So. . .
how does that...
"So. . .
how does that work, exactly ? ". . . done alphabetically within the confines of the color arrangement."
Fiction: blue A-Z, green A-Z, etc.
Biography: blue A-Z, green A-Z, etc.
Like that ?
That would make some nice little color groups."
Exactly, or you would cover all fiction in a hue, all nonfiction in a hue, design books in a hue etc.

Love
Olive's olifactory theory ..
and Woofwoof- I was about to mention record spines/ covers.
I used to DJ professionally, back in the day when it was all vinyl, and recognition by colour and combinations of colour and pattern were very important to me - smokey and dark clubs were hardly conducive to small print... I suppose we're back to corporate identitity?

I like Olive's idea but if...
I like Olive's idea but if smell indicated subject matter the Ikea catalogue would have to go outside.
Perhaps the answer for those who need books but would rather not see them is a Kindle?

Just dont
Just don't have books. Problem solved AND think about all the storage space you'll have available.

I agree...
Burn them all!

Auntie Mame
"Books are awfully decorative, don't you think?" That's a line from the film Auntie Mame, spoken by a character in order to help establish her character's superficiality. 🙂

Maybe I'll give mine to the...
Maybe I'll give mine to the library and get a card.

The good old public library
I use mine regularly! Sure does cut down on the number of paperback I have to find a home for!

those interior design mags...
those interior design mags are ridiculous, the perfect lives/photos/furniture/people/dogs and happy children just make me want to set fire to things, starting with huge glass bowl full of limes in the kirtchen and moving on quickly to the sleeping labarador on the bleached wood floor.