Hello!

What books do you think all conlang enthusiasts should read?

CONLANG-L recommended to me Describing Morphosyntax by Thomas E. Payne. They called it the "conlanging cookbook"; it's definitely one of the best books I've bought for having a checklist of all the "weird" ;) things languages can differentiate or grammaticalize, along with non-IE examples!

I'm waiting for my cuecat and will put in my entire library when I get it, I'll point out the good ones with tags then.

Due to computer problems, it will be tomorrow before I can post again at any length, but already I'm intrigued!

I will second the recommendation of Describing Morphosyntax. Not only does it give you all sorts of features you might want to use in a conlang, but it can definitely help you better describe an existing project. I keep it close by as a general reference for conlanging.

I wonder if the author knows he has written a book that gets such great reviews in a community other than the one for which it was actually intended. :)

I'd also suggest George Campbell's hideously expensive Compendium of the World's Languages if you can get it. When I gave in and bought it through my university, they wanted to log it as a departmental purchase. (sigh)

I've got my cuecat now and have started scanning.

What is a cuecat, anyway?

A cuecat is a simple, cheap barcode scanner. Librarything offers one and it is great to quickly scan in your library via the ISBN-code... though it turns out I have several books without an ISBN :) None relevant to conlanging so far though.

The cuecat is mentioned on librarything's tools-page. You can also get them through ebay and several similar places. I recommend getting the USB version as it's plug-and-play just about anywhere.

I haven't found ISBN's to be all that big a help here, but then again, I have a strange library . . . :)