Old Stuff

Hi Bill,

I use the famous read/unread system. Since the advent of amazon.com, purchases have exploded while reading time has remained at best the same. This requires "read" shelves and the "unread" shelves and creates bloody havoc with organized systems.

What I used to do is divide into fiction/nonfiction and within fiction by author's name. The non-fiction is organized into histories, biographies, religious, sports, travel and other. The histories and bio's are arranged chronologically, sports by sport, travel by region, and everything else is currently haphazardly arranged.

About 50% of the time I can find a given book in a reasonably short time.

Some thoughts -

I don't distinguish between read and unread. The last time I read one book at a time from cover to cover then began another one was in 2000 when my wife and I made our way through the Aubrey/Maturin series. All told I have probably a dozen books going at once due to the faults of restlessness and what a scholastic would probably call curiousity.

Another problem I have is that I'm terrible at classifying, then maintaining that classification in later reshelvings.

One huge advantage to having a number on the spine of each book is that I'm then compelled by another fault to put it right back in that one place every time. If they're all numbered, it would take a fire to get me to shelve a book without getting it in exactly the right place, straightening the neighboring books, and standing back to admire the whole collection once again.

About Dewey vs LC, I've decided to go with LC. Dewey seems suited for broad collections, while LC seems to provide better granularity for narrow deep collections focused on a few subjects. LC is aesthetically pleasing, too, since the inital letters serve to distinguish the books more than a simple utilitarian string of Dewey numbers.

Thanks for the comment!

I use a modified, limited Dewey derivative of my own (mediocre) design. Reference and Misc in the 000 range, Christian Religious in the 200's, computers in the 800's, etc. All with subcategories more or less adhered to. Of course, that's just my online system, the shelves are really categorized by broad category first then aesthetic value (by size or binding). With less than 1,100 in the collection at any one time, it's not too hard to find a particular book. I mostly did the online inventory so I could avoid buying duplicates, but it's come in handy when offering to loan them out.

Re If they're all numbered, it would take a fire to get me to shelve a book without getting it in exactly the right place, straightening the neighboring books, and standing back to admire the whole collection once again.

If that's true, then it would be worth the time getting mine organized. My fear has always been that the organizing would not be ongoing.

I'm always reading twelve books at once too, and I remember my wife reading one of those "How to Tell If Your Man Will Commit" type of books, and she said that one of the danger signs is a man who is always reading a dozen books. The author wrote "if he can't commit to a book at a time, how will he commit to one woman?". Fortunately I've been faithful and my wife didn't take the book's advice and dump me for a one-book-at-a-time man!

TS, studies have not shown any correlation between adultery and polybibliophilia (the clinical term for the love of multiple books at the same time). :-D

Man, that's one lousy marriage prep book!

Having worked in a few libraries, I confess to a great fondness for the LC system. Also, most books recently published already include the LC # in the cataloguing in publication blurb (usually in the first few pages of the book).

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