Forgive me, I’m under the weather. Possibly literally as we’ve had more than a week of storms here in Texas, but also I feel like I have some flavor of cold. Ugh, ick, do not recommend, contains hammered poo.
One bright spot is that I’d ordered some books and they showed up. Generally, if I mail-order books they are for research. One of these books was not like the others. I bought myself an indulgent book, one which I don’t really need but which also will be an invaluable help as I’m getting my personal library reorganized after moving new shelves in a few months ago. Getting frustrated with knowing I have that book, or even ‘a book on that topic’ and being unable to lay my hands on it. So? I bought myself an abridged Dewey Decimal Classification.
Many modern books, like this one I’ve picked up for research on a long-dormant WIP, have their Dewey number helpfully included, as you’ll see where my pocketknife is pointing (I had just opened the package, I do have other more ladylike pointers). However, I own a lot of antique books. Those get a little more challenging. Without even getting into the throes of the decisions on where to put an ambiguous book which defies simple classification. Those are likely to be set in place depending on what I personally plan to use them for, whether that be a research topic or, say, gardening. I’m thinking about the Foxfire books, specifically, as they contain multitudes.
For most people, this is likely overkill. For me, it’s because I’m a… nerd, geek, dork, pick your poison. I have the heart of a librarian. Besides, this will be an excellent procrastination project when I get a bit stuck on the novel I’m writing this month (yes, I plan to finish it this month, but to be fair I started work on it with almost 40K words extant).
Why have a library? Well, I don’t think ebooks are going away, and I do pretty much all my fiction reading in that space. I really like the ability to annotate, bookmark, search, and snip quote an ebook I’m using for research. I do not like the ability the publisher has to go back in a book and bowlderize it. For that alone, I have acquired certain books of fiction. And there are so many books which have fallen in the copyright trap: they aren’t old enough to be in public domain, no one cares about their publication any longer and the author is long-dead so there is no ebook. Plus, research ebooks tend to be stupidly priced. I picked up this used hardback you see above for just a few dollars, shipping included. Also my book horde is legion and makes me happy.
Ugh. Typing is uncomfortable. I think I’ll go lie down again. Sorry, folks. Next week perhaps I’ll feel up to something more useful to you all. Although I do want to know if any of you also pick up a cheap used Dewey!
Mad Genius Club 
7 responses to “The writer’s library”
Man, that way lies madness in my household. (Not that I haven’t dreamed about it). I don’t know how many bookcases we own (a set of 100 library tall metal shelves and maybe 40 others) but what I do know is how many fit inside a 1712 cabin (not enough, but more than you would think – there are two floors.) All the rest (and much of their contents) are in storage 30 miles away, In boxes.
Yes, yes, I know this is crazy but… I married the only man I knew with as many books as I had (funny how that works), and it’s not like we stopped there. And while there is a significant degree of overlap, it’s far from useful. At this point, physical purchases are rare, and I have plenty of tech space, so the physical component doesn’t grow as quickly as it used to, but since some of it is collectibles (sporting) with monetary value, the impact is still felt on our shrinking dwelling space.
There will be some sales of the specialized valuable stuff in the foreseeable future, but other than that I have no clue what will happen to the rest. The treasure hunts for used books on fishing excursions hardly exist anymore — those guys are pretty much all gone. Libraries aren’t interested. As they say, you can’t give them away (not even to local libraries), and if I had heirs (we don’t) I wouldn’t burden them with it. I suppose if you gathered them together, it would make a good pyre for Valhalla.
Suggestions?
Granted, all of this takes work but those are possible options.
I have yet to tackle the problem with my book library where many still lie in boxes. However, as an ontologist, I came up with a different solution to my DVD library (only about 400 but still….). I shelve them all by title alphabetically, then enter them into a spreadsheet with as many columns as I need for whatever classification I dream up. That way I can sort and re-sort them in the spreadsheet to my heart’s content, but easily find the physical copy once I know what I’m looking for.
Google’s gmail service offers a similar solution with its ‘label’ option. I can give an email as many labels as I like, then just archive it, and search for old emails by the label I’m interested in at the moment.
My family library is roughly sorted by subject, but shelves overflow as new books get put “close to where they should be.” Back in the early 2000s we gave away over 3K titles and restocked a county library that needed them. In 2018 DadRed and I gave away over 350 military history books to one of the JROTCs here. (The Master Sergeant had to be gently reminded that he could take the book with him, and he grabbed the biography of “Brute” Krulak off the top of a stack and started reading as his associates moved tomes.)
Now the shelves overfloweth once more. And then there’s the e-reader …
I hope you are reading this comment while lying down in bed and sipping on some sort of healing liquid. I might have to think of Dewey since my categorization is vague.
At one point I had my SF/F paperback collection in order of original publication date. This system broke down as it grew, and my reading genres expanded when I decided to try my hand at fiction writing.
So now I have a couple hundred SF/F books on shelf above my headboard (the ones I think I’m more likely to want to read again), another couple hundred SF/F on a shelf I installed around two walls of my bedroom (at 7 feet up to avoid interfereing with anything else), dozens of history and writing books on another bookshelf in the room, storage totes and boxes full of hundreds more SF/F, Men’s Adventure, Spy/Detective etc. A few boxes of overflow in the storage unit.
A few hundred ebooks on my Andoid tablet (the ones from Amazon converted to epub files so have local copies free of possible meddling; you now have to jump through so many hoops to convert the Amazon proprietary file format that I just don’t buy ebooks from Amazon anymore – so sorry to all the indie authors here).
Since I hadly read anymore books at all these days (just news and tech/science etc. on the Internet), there is probably enough TBR for the rest of my life expectancy.
The physical books it doesn’t help that I probably need new reading glasses; the ones from a couple years ago almost seem to strong and give me eyestrain.
funnily, I saw this just as I had started deciding on a scheme for part of my collection that needs it. Almost all of the books I don’t know where to find are on one of four broad topics, and I already know some of the best for me divisions within those. I may have still picked a stupid way to handle it, but I guess I will see.
I’ve just checked against Dewey and LoC (1), and I think that since my collection is quite focused, right now it makes more sense to do my own organizing.
(1) For inspiration, if nothing else.