Sorting Books

I have not put mine in order since moving house - usually sorted by genre and author - the antique books are in a book case with glass doors - whats the point of rescuing them if I just dump them on the floor. I need to cull the book herd by a hundredish. The difficulty is in deciding what should go - they are rather like old friends - excepting the James Joyce Ulysses - which was a compulsory book list purchase - never opened beyond about page ten I should imagine. I would never part with the copy of Jane Eyre that my sister gave me - a young girls gift to a younger sibling - that sits with the old books in safest place.

 

For years I obsessively sorted my books by author and date published. I also spent countless hours categorizing my LP and CD collections.

These days I spend the same amount of time tinkering with iTunes and Calibre.

 

I am a library. I have so many books—can't part with any of them (I'm beyond help from Bibliophiliacs Anonymous—Is that what the "B.A." classically stood for?)—that I gave up shelves. I'm a creature of numbered boxes and a database with keyword searching, as well as title, author, etc.

I am made of books. Who was the early Modern painter who made portraits out of vegetables? I am made of pages.

I am all textuality (beyond Derrida).

Practically, though, I want to suggest that you determine what's most important to you, display that on shelves that contain what you'll likely need in the coming couple of years and what you like most to talk about with friends; and develop a storage convention with a searchable list. It doesn't have to be a formal database. If you simply list all of your books in a Word document (I use Pages in iWork for Macintosh) with the location box that it's in, you can group books however you choose, putting juicy titles in multiple gardens.

But I'm in love with my databases. I have databases for my writing development, too. I am an information junkie, but I live in a sublime ecology.

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I sort my books like I sort my laundry.

 

I like sorting them by size and sometimes colour.

Nothing bugs me more than seeing tall books mixed in with short books. It should be tall at one end and shorter at the other. Anything else gets sorted.

 

By use. The coffee table style books are in the living room, except the ones that are still in boxes from when we moved into this place back in 1992. Old university texts are also in boxes, except those that got moldy and tossed out. Pulp fiction is distributed around the house - several volumes in the downstairs bathroom, master bedroom bookshelf (as Charlatan points out - usually by size because a lot of other stuff gets stored on the book shelves - such as power cables for ipods, back scratchers, tweezers, body lotions, old VHS tapes that we haven't thrown out yet). The kid's rooms are stuffed with all kinds of books collecting dust.

for the past 3 or 4 years we've adopted the ereader movement (2 Kobos, 1 Aluratek, 1 Kindle & 2 Ipads) so a lot of our books have been donated or sold at street sales. It's so liberating to have all the books I want on a single storage drive. Unless I want to do a hands on perusal of a big picture book, I can unbox those old coffee table books now that I am getting rid of my pulp fiction - there's tons of space!

 

I prefer a tall at both ends, shorter in the middle sort of flow. Except for mass-market paperbacks and small novelty books which should always be shelved together.
I feel like reorganizing my books now.

 

i feel quite flush with achievement because i got rid of 10 boxes of books yesterday.
mostly duplicates or crappy older paperbacks.
and academic journals.
getting rid of those pleased me. such horseshit, in the main.

there are many books in the treefort. the organizational system is in flux. apparently, philosophy is now ordered chronologically more or less by author. other sectors are in what one might think of as aleatory. this obtains with respect to the aleatory itself, so it's not completely random, but more random about randomness. so there are patches of order and then everything else. i'm fine with that, personally, because i tend to memorize sequences whether i want to or not. but flux is in effect.

 

Behold, the converted closet Judaica library. Look on my professional books, ye mighty, and despair....

 

i shall post a photograph of the walls of books once the study is more put together.
getting there.
a creeping organization has arrived in the books.

 

I reorganized my books today. Which means I actually accomplished something. Can't let happen again tomorrow.

 

Having unloaded a number of books on my ex when she moved out and emptied the shelves of all the books I thought she was going to take but didn't, I have a feeling my collection of books in general is due for a bit of an overhaul in the coming weeks... not that this is necessarily a bad thing, but it might require moving the bookshelves around themselves, since ideally the guestroom/office is going to be undergoing a more substantial overhaul of its own in time.

I am trying not to let perfectionist tendencies get in the way of getting this all done, and I'm finding that to be more of a challenge than perhaps I'd bargained for.

I want built-in bookshelves, though... they're just something I've coveted for a while, and maybe someday I'll get them.

 

Dewey Decimal System

Dewey Decimal System - A Guide to Call Numbers

 

the library had mostly been in storage for 4 years. so all the books had to be cleaned. denatured alcohol does the trick, as it turns out. so now they're all shiny. four large bookcases in the study/winter palace, two more in the living room....

 

My house cleaner is coming Monday, so my books are sorted into stacks between "I don't know where I put the damn thing" and "oh, there is a stack over here"?