1HeatherLeaFive
Hi!!
I am SO glad I found this website. A while ago in one of my "I have to get my house in order" moods I hit Pinterest and searched "how do I organize my books". First and often was "Why by COLOR of course"!! Ummm - not for us. Maybe for some - but not for us.
My husband is a book collector and I like books. We met at a bookstore and he hired me :) I quickly found other employment and we've been together since 1987. So - no, by color won't do.
I went down the rabbit hole and then discovered LT! I am SO glad. I cataloged my first book 6/24/21 and I just finished ALLLL the book cases in my house. Coincidentally - the first day to catalog was my late bff's BD. She loved books more than me.
I just wanted to tell someone - or a bunch of stranger someone's what I accomplished.
I have a bucket of kids books that came down from the attic that need to be cataloged and all the books that have come into the house since I started doing this. But - first round is FINISHED!
Now - to put the books in order so we can actually find them if we want them. I DID find some gems that I'd totally forgotten about.
Heather.
I am SO glad I found this website. A while ago in one of my "I have to get my house in order" moods I hit Pinterest and searched "how do I organize my books". First and often was "Why by COLOR of course"!! Ummm - not for us. Maybe for some - but not for us.
My husband is a book collector and I like books. We met at a bookstore and he hired me :) I quickly found other employment and we've been together since 1987. So - no, by color won't do.
I went down the rabbit hole and then discovered LT! I am SO glad. I cataloged my first book 6/24/21 and I just finished ALLLL the book cases in my house. Coincidentally - the first day to catalog was my late bff's BD. She loved books more than me.
I just wanted to tell someone - or a bunch of stranger someone's what I accomplished.
I have a bucket of kids books that came down from the attic that need to be cataloged and all the books that have come into the house since I started doing this. But - first round is FINISHED!
Now - to put the books in order so we can actually find them if we want them. I DID find some gems that I'd totally forgotten about.
Heather.
2reconditereader
Congrats!
3Buchmerkur
hurray!
4Petroglyph
Congratulations! Happy cataloguing!
5SandraArdnas
LT is awesome for anyone with more than a hundred books :) Happy cataloguing. Other call number is a dedicated field to easily track location. Just saying in case you haven't noticed yet. There are so many features and some you only realize after a while.
6HeatherLeaFive
Currently 1488!!
Thank you everyone :)
Thank you everyone :)
8Petroglyph
Whenever the topic of oranizing by colour comes up, my mind automatically serves up the following anecdote from Anne Fadiman's essay Marrying libraries:
(from her brilliant essay collection Ex libris: confessions of a common reader. Here's a pdf link to the essay in question.)
After five years of marriage and a child, George and I finally resolved that we were ready for the more profound intimacy of library consolidation. It was unclear, however, how we were to find a meeting point between his English-garden approach and my French-garden one. At least in the short run, I prevailed, on the theory that he could find his books if they were arranged like mine but I could never find mine if they were arranged like his. We agreed to sort by topic—History, Psychology, Nature, Travel, and so on. Literature would be subdivided by nationality. (If George found this plan excessively finicky, at least he granted that it was a damn sight better than the system some friends of ours had told us about. Some friends of theirs had rented their house for several months to an interior decorator. When they returned, they discovered that their entire library had been reorganized by color and size. Shortly thereafter, the decorator met with a fatal automobile accident. I confess that when this story was told, everyone around the dinner table concurred that justice had been served.)
(from her brilliant essay collection Ex libris: confessions of a common reader. Here's a pdf link to the essay in question.)
92wonderY
>8 Petroglyph: I said a bad word out loud when I read what the decorator had done! Audacious and rude, rude, RUDE!
10shadrach_anki
>8 Petroglyph: I think it's about time I reread that collection of essays because it is truly delightful.
I can see the potential value of arranging a small subset of books by colour. Something like a TBR shelf, say. Or maybe you have a bunch of those clothbound classics from Penguin that you want to display, which are as much visual art as they are literary art. But those are very specific and limited situations; I don't see how it works for anything larger.
Of course, I say this while having a completely disorganized personal library. It's a work in progress, and progress is slow.
I can see the potential value of arranging a small subset of books by colour. Something like a TBR shelf, say. Or maybe you have a bunch of those clothbound classics from Penguin that you want to display, which are as much visual art as they are literary art. But those are very specific and limited situations; I don't see how it works for anything larger.
Of course, I say this while having a completely disorganized personal library. It's a work in progress, and progress is slow.
11Petroglyph
>10 shadrach_anki:
Right? Sorting by colour works, like you say, for limited-in-scope subsets, or perhaps if your library amounts to less than a few hundred books. Or perhaps I'm a curmudgeon who prioritizes being able to find books one at a time over the aesthetic aspect. Whatever the case may be, I've made my choice and I'm happy with it.
My SO and I re-read this essay again, and it sparked a discussion about whether we would ever intermingle our libraries. Probably some subsets (reference, yellow penguins, black-and-orange penguins), but our ways of sorting and accessing our fiction is just too different.
Right? Sorting by colour works, like you say, for limited-in-scope subsets, or perhaps if your library amounts to less than a few hundred books. Or perhaps I'm a curmudgeon who prioritizes being able to find books one at a time over the aesthetic aspect. Whatever the case may be, I've made my choice and I'm happy with it.
My SO and I re-read this essay again, and it sparked a discussion about whether we would ever intermingle our libraries. Probably some subsets (reference, yellow penguins, black-and-orange penguins), but our ways of sorting and accessing our fiction is just too different.
12HeatherLeaFive
I guess I am making progress but it certainly does not feel like it. I have 2.5 cases of fiction (almost) perfectly organized. I have my 0-500's (Religion has its own case in a different room) in order as I come up on them. My book count is now up to 1578. I really don't see an end yet in organizing.
13Buchmerkur
>12 HeatherLeaFive: count before was 1488 - so great work done in the meantime! Way to go!
