BS: 2,000 and Counting

Subject: BS: 2,000 and Counting
From: Owen Woodson
Date: 20 Sep 12 - 12:12 PM

A couple of weeks ago, having lost complete track of everything in my book collection, and fed up with ordering books I'd already got, I siezed on a plan. Thinks I, I'll compile a spreadsheet list of all my books on my computer. Nothing fancy. Just the title, author, publisher and year of publication.

This afternoon I passed the 2,000 mark, which is a bit like saying that you're on a walk from John O' Groats to Lands End, and you've got as far as Inverness.

What, I hear you ask, was the 2,000th volume in this extraordinarily epochal odyssey?

Believe it or not, it was The Image of Ivan The Terrible In Russian Folklore, by Maureen Perrie.

That'll teach you to go asking silly questions.

Subject: RE: BS: 2,000 and Counting
From: Wesley S
Date: 20 Sep 12 - 12:18 PM

How far are you from being finished?

Subject: RE: BS: 2,000 and Counting
From: Owen Woodson
Date: 20 Sep 12 - 12:32 PM

I dunno. How high is Mount Everest? Seriously, I'm torn between listing every single book I've got in the house and cutting it short once I've reached the more ephemeral items. P/B novels and so forth

Subject: RE: BS: 2,000 and Counting
From: gnu
Date: 20 Sep 12 - 03:30 PM

How do you find time to post here?

Subject: RE: BS: 2,000 and Counting
From: GUEST,Eliza
Date: 20 Sep 12 - 03:53 PM

This sounds a bit OCD to me, Owen. You don't have them all arranged in alphabetical order on your shelves do you?

Subject: RE: BS: 2,000 and Counting
From: Owen Woodson
Date: 20 Sep 12 - 04:37 PM

What's OCD?

They are shelved alphabetically in subject order, or at least they used to be. I had the books on socialism wedged between social history and topography. That was fine until the socialists began preaching world revolution and exhorting all the other books to rise up and overthrow their typesetters.

Now I've got them confined to a seperate part of the house, where the only thing I have to put up with is occasional rousing choruses of the Internationale.

Subject: RE: BS: 2,000 and Counting
From: Bill D
Date: 20 Sep 12 - 04:48 PM

I moved too often when *I* had something near that number..(when I was in college). Never could get them all out and organized. Had the Sci-Fi in good order..briefly ...about 35 years ago.

Finally sold and gave away many. Now I have several hundred on folk music and woodworking, and my wife has books on art and nature to equal what I have lost. Organization means remembering which general shelf or stack one is in...

Subject: RE: BS: 2,000 and Counting
From: GUEST,leeneia
Date: 20 Sep 12 - 06:03 PM

Friends of mine have hundreds of books in a house built in 1900. The books are mostly in bookscases up against the walls (a strong part of the house). They wanted to put more bookscases in the middle of some of the rooms, but an architect visited and told them not to. They were in danger of causing the floors to collapse.

In my opinion, that is too many books. So, Owen, have you given thought to the weight of all your books and the strength of your home?

Subject: RE: BS: 2,000 and Counting
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 20 Sep 12 - 08:32 PM

OCD - Obsessive Compulsive disorder

As someone who arranged most of her books in alphabetical by author (fiction) and by subject (non-fiction) I can't see a thing wrong with what he's doing. A number of people have put their books into sites like LibraryThing, but after a couple of hundred you have to pay to use the service.

SRS

Subject: RE: BS: 2,000 and Counting
From: JohnInKansas
Date: 20 Sep 12 - 08:48 PM

I began keeping a list of books I had, and added new books Lin and I bought as we merged libraries; but I stopped keeping track when we hit 2,187 titles in 2003 (last entry 07 May).

At about that time, in order to answer a mudcat thread, I measured our book shelves and found 308 lineal feet of shelves in 38 mostly 6 ft tall bookcases, but with her paperbacks nearly all in double rows (one behind the other) and I didn't get a measurement on the depths of the additional stacks and piles where they'd started going when we ran out of shelves - and walls.

More recently when we moved from the 5,000 sq foot house to an 870 sq ft one, the books became sort of a problem, so I started scanning the ones of mine I wanted to keep and making .pdf files, and tossing the paper. With this method, for the most part each book is a file name, although for some of the larger books I split them down into shorter sections (Like the Chevy Service and Overhaul Manual that was 4 volumes and a total of about 4,800 pages).

A simple batch file [ DIR *.* /S >books.txt ] makes a text file that's automatically a usable list of books on file, and by "batching it" it only takes a few minutes to update periodically.

At present, the list file shows 279,800,666,172 bytes in a list of 20,930 files in the books folder, although some of the "files" are non-titles (Dirs and blank lines, etc). The "index" text file opens as 545 pages in Word, and lists 2,946 pdf files; but I've only scanned about half of what I had so far. Lin won't let me scan hers (yet) because they're all "too precious" to be taken apart to run through the scanner, and it's extremely difficult to get clean scans, especially of small pages, in a bound book on a flatbed; but at least most of her recent new acquisitions have been digital books for her Nook (about 226 new titles - in about the last year(?) - as of the last time she'd tell me anything about it).

John

Subject: RE: BS: 2,000 and Counting
From: Gurney
Date: 20 Sep 12 - 10:38 PM

When my son started college, one project they called for was just to count the books 'at home.' He reported just under 2000.
They as good as called him a liar.
He wasn't lying. And he didn't know about the books 'stored' in the roof-space.

Subject: RE: BS: 2,000 and Counting
From: Owen Woodson
Date: 21 Sep 12 - 05:16 AM

Leenia,

Fear not. The Woodson household is not about to collapse. All my books are stacked in bookcases which are firmly attached to the walls. Stacking them in the middle of the room could well apply undue torsion to the load bearing timbers,or stone floor, which is why your architect friend was concerned. But that won't happen if the bookcases are situated where they can only apply direct vertical force.

Unless there's dry rot down there which I don't know about of course.

Stilly River Sage. "OCD - Obsessive Compulsive disorder". It's not, unless an insatiable thirst for reading and knowledge and trying to be dead clever can count as such. It's just that, no matter how hard I try, I never can keep the books in their appropriate places on the shelves.

The scenario goes like this. I find an affordable copy of the Folklore of Upper Transylvania on the Internet. Thinks I, "I'm sure I've got a copy already." I check along the shelf in the place where it should be and can't see one. I order it and go to place it on the shelf and find I'e positioned it next to the one I'd bought 20 years earlier.

Now, with my trusty spreadsheet, all I have to do is search on appropriate word and up it will come, or not, as the case may be.

BTW., I've done the same thing with my record collection and that is every bit as handy.

Subject: RE: BS: 2,000 and Counting
From: Musket
Date: 21 Sep 12 - 06:18 AM

Why ask what OCD is and then go on to explain it?

:-)

Subject: RE: BS: 2,000 and Counting
From: GUEST,Eliza
Date: 21 Sep 12 - 11:30 AM

But if your books are there on the shelves in front of you, in subjects or alphabetical order etc. why would you need to list them? There they are and you can see at a glance what's there! Have to say I have loads and loads of books, and adore reading (have done since I was two) so I understand your pleasure in it. But making lists...why?

Subject: RE: BS: 2,000 and Counting
From: GUEST,sturgeon
Date: 21 Sep 12 - 02:37 PM

Do what Pepe Carvalho does and burn the most pretentious.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepe_Carvalho

'Another Pepe Carvalho idiosyncrasy: he loves to burn books. When asked why, Pepe once commented: "It's an old habit of mine. For forty years I read book after book, now I burn them because they taught me nothing of how to live." When Montalbán was asked the same question, he replied: "It's a cultural sarcasm deriving from the supposedly low culture nature inherent in the detective genre. Moreover, it allows me to play a few small cultural jokes: burning Quijote or The Theory of Life by Engels. On one occasion Carvalho burns an anthology of erotic Spanish poetry whose editors had lacked the good sense to include me"

Subject: RE: BS: 2,000 and Counting
From: GUEST,Eliza
Date: 22 Sep 12 - 12:48 PM

I help at several village sales for the church, village hall etc. And this autumn we've decided not to include a book stall. Books just don't sell, nobody wants them. We've tried to offload our boxes of surplus books to charity shops but they don't want them either, as no-one buys them. I suppose people prefer those Kindle things, or watch DVDs instead. Even our public library has quite a large section of DVDs and recorded books to listen to, not to mention row upon row of computers. Is a love of books dying out? How times change!

Subject: RE: BS: 2,000 and Counting
From: gnu
Date: 22 Sep 12 - 02:05 PM

Nope... they are cheaper in e-format. And more green.

Subject: RE: BS: 2,000 and Counting
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 22 Sep 12 - 02:07 PM

Owen, I only answered the OCD question because you asked it. I don't think collecting and organizing books is a disorder. The disorder is in a hoarding context where you have to walk between stacks and can't see the floor or most of the furniture surfaces in your house. :)

SRS

Subject: RE: BS: 2,000 and Counting
From: Owen Woodson
Date: 22 Sep 12 - 04:01 PM

Eliza. "But if your books are there on the shelves in front of you, in subjects or alphabetical order etc. why would you need to list them?"

Because listed alphabetically in subject order is the way it ought to work. In practice, either I put them back in the wrong places or the books re-arrange themselves when I'm not looking. Alternatively, anyone with an interest in folklore will probably have a lot of books on elves, fairies, goblins and so forth. I know I have, so maybe they're the ones who keep reducing my life to chaos.

Anyway, having them listed alphabetically in subject order won't be of much use the next time I spot a second hand bookshop in some remote corner of the Cairngorms. But with my trusty spreadsheet installed on my trusty laptop, I can take the list with me wherever I go and interrogate it on the spot.

SRS. No worries. I just couldn't recall what OCD meant. Collecting, organizing and cataloguing books is a hobby, not a disorder. Obsessive compulsive disorder is when you've got your hands round the throat of somebody you cannot stand, and for some strange reason, can't let go. The entire Tory front bench? Who said anything about the entire Tory front bench?

Subject: RE: BS: 2,000 and Counting
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 22 Sep 12 - 05:07 PM

My father was a folksinger, was a folklorist, and was a college reference librarian. He had a 3-ring notebook with pages of book titles in a backpack that he kept in his car. It worked as much for mysteries (he devoured them) as for folk reference books. In Vancouver or Victoria for a folksong event? He'd hit local bookstores (used and new). Same with Seattle, Portland, wherever. There were a few duplicates in his collection when I settled his estate, but since he typically mailed copies of books he really like that he thought we'd enjoy, I have to presume the duplicates I found were those he hadn't had time to mail before he died.

SRS

Subject: RE: BS: 2,000 and Counting
From: Owen Woodson
Date: 23 Sep 12 - 06:23 AM

If he was a librarian, I think we can take it that he was a little bit better organised than me. Probably a bit better at remembering what he'd got than me as well.

Subject: RE: BS: 2,000 and Counting
From: Owen Woodson
Date: 14 Nov 12 - 08:52 AM

Thought folks might like to know I've just passed the 3,000 mark in my efforts to catalogue every book in my collection. On the scale of John o' Groats to Lands End, that probably puts me down somewhere down around Birmingham.

The 3000th volume was The World We Have Lost, Peter Laslett's masterful study of the social history of pre-Industrial England. Highly recommended, and one which I've read several times.

Subject: RE: BS: 2,000 and Counting
From: Charmion
Date: 14 Nov 12 - 09:08 AM

I love "The World We Have Lost", and still have the dog-eared paperback copy I bought as a student in 1982. It lives in a row of tall Ikea bookcase with several hundred other works of social and military history, organized chronologically (by period studied) and by topic.

Every single room of our house except the bathrooms and the front hall has at least one bookcase in it. Two rooms are essentially libraries. Yes, fiction and other leisure reading -- essays, poetry, collections of cartoons -- are organized alphabetically by author.

Organization is the passive defence against the dreaded "book problem" -- stacks of books on the floor, up the stairs, and all over every flat surface. The active defence is the periodic purge -- the act of filling cardboard boxes with books that aren't likely to be read again and re-homing them.

Subject: RE: BS: 2,000 and Counting
From: GUEST,leeneia
Date: 14 Nov 12 - 11:10 AM

Hello, Owen. Thanks for asking my question a while back. I'm glad you are thinking about the weight of your collection and keeping it in a safe place.

I used to work in a law office, and there I read about a different law office that worked out of a fine-looking, old home. The lawyers kept old files in the attic. Then one day they came in and found that the attic joists had failed under the weight. Everything in the building - files, books, desks and computers was in a pile in the basement.

Subject: RE: BS: 2,000 and Counting
From: GUEST,crazy little woman
Date: 14 Nov 12 - 11:15 AM

My library has thought of a good use for books nobody wants to read. See if this link works.

new meaning for reading circle

Subject: RE: BS: 2,000 and Counting
From: Sandra in Sydney
Date: 14 Nov 12 - 07:08 PM

I love it, thanks for posting the pic

I live in a 4 room apartment, with bookshelves & display cabinets around the bedroom & living room walls. Once upon a time my physio wanted me to use a wall to stretch my legs, what wall? I said.

I have several thousand books which are arranged by subject & then author/title. A few books are out of order at the ends of shelves so that the toys & ornaments that sit in front of books can do so uninterrupted. I have several book lists (historic costume my biggest collection) & folklore/songs (one of the small collections which does grow slowly) & my small SF/Fantasy collection, so if I ever saw a title by an author I collected, I didn't buy a title I already had. I haven't carried that list about since I bought the last book in the last series.

Due to lack of space most of my reading is library books, but I do buy a small number of books each year.

sandra (retired librarian)

Subject: RE: BS: 2,000 and Counting
From: JohnInKansas
Date: 14 Nov 12 - 09:36 PM

what wall? I said,

In our house, it's been so long since we've seen one our response is:

"What's a wall?"

The only place we've had not covered by bookcases was in the previous house in the bedroom, where half of what probably was a wall(?) beside the bed was covered by portraits of 97 (I counted once) of her dead ancestors.

Somewhat like sleeping in a mausoleum(?) for me, but she liked having them up there.

John

Subject: RE: BS: 2,000 and Counting
From: Bobert
Date: 14 Nov 12 - 10:10 PM

I have a different/similar problem with LPs... I don't think I have 2,000 but maybe 1,200 - 1,300...

One day I will have to get them sorted out/"spread sheet"...

B;~(

Subject: RE: BS: 2,000 and Counting
From: GUEST,KENDALL
Date: 15 Nov 12 - 03:48 PM

Just curious, Owen, are you related to Jesse James? His middle name was Woodson.

Subject: RE: BS: 2,000 and Counting
From: Owen Woodson
Date: 16 Nov 12 - 05:34 AM

No sir. I ain't got no family connections with Jesse James that I iver heerd of. But any critter who robs the rich to help the poor, like what ol' Jesse was supposed to have done, sure as hell gits mah vote.

Subject: RE: BS: 2,000 and Counting
From: Owen Woodson
Date: 14 Jan 13 - 07:32 AM

3,638 and no books left to count; at least not until the next shedload arrives.

Book No 3638? Come Go Home With Me by Sheila Kay Adams. Nice find

Subject: RE: BS: 2,000 and Counting
From: GUEST,999
Date: 14 Jan 13 - 07:49 AM

Owen, file them in alphabetical order by the third letter of the author's last name in even numbered rows and the second letter of the title in odd numbered rows. Don't include definite or indefinite articles as part of the title so as to avoid confusion. I've done that for years with approximately 2500 books. I can't immediately locate any particular pieces but I sleep well knowing there's a system in place.

Subject: RE: BS: 2,000 and Counting
From: Owen Woodson
Date: 14 Jan 13 - 08:02 AM

Guest 999. They're filed alphabetically in subject order. The SKA arived just this morning, which is why it's out of sequence on the spreadsheet.

But why on earth would I want to file them by the third letter of the author's last name, and then by the second letter of the title? And what's all this about odd and even numbered rows? Oh, I get it. It's a wind up.

Subject: RE: BS: 2,000 and Counting
From: Rapparee
Date: 14 Jan 13 - 08:31 AM

1,555 from my office. This does not include the fiction (shelved outside my office), my wife's books, or "our" books. We estimate the ultimate count at around 6,000; as retired pro librarians we think this is a fair estimate.

After the books comes the LPs, cassettes, and CDs.

We use "Collectorz" software.

Subject: RE: BS: 2,000 and Counting
From: GUEST,999
Date: 14 Jan 13 - 09:50 AM

I'm actually without books now. I've gone through something like 7500 in the course of my life--and that figure is yanked out of midair because three 'collections' have been dispensed to public, school and hospital libraries at various times, mostly when shipping or storage charges became more than it was possible for me to pay. I do admire people who can get it all organized. My idea of organization was to have separate piles of books scattered hither and yon, some by subject, some by author, some by their innate ability to stack properly without falling over. These days the public library is my source for reading material and they seem to have a system in place to locate things.

Subject: RE: BS: 2,000 and Counting
From: Midchuck
Date: 14 Jan 13 - 10:07 AM

No sir. I ain't got no family connections with Jesse James that I iver heerd of. But any critter who robs the rich to help the poor, like what ol' Jesse was supposed to have done, sure as hell gits mah vote.

Dissenting opinion.

Peter

Subject: RE: BS: 2,000 and Counting
From: Owen Woodson
Date: 14 Jan 13 - 10:11 AM

Like I said "what old Jesse was supposed to have done", not what he actually done.

Subject: RE: BS: 2,000 and Counting
From: GUEST,kendall
Date: 14 Jan 13 - 10:21 AM

Jesse James was no Robin Hood.

I could use some of that OCD myself. Whenever I need a wrench I have to look through the screwdrivers,wire cutters, hammers, and I often find it on the floor under a sheet of used sand paper.

Just yesterday I went looking for my skill saw, made three trips around the garage and finally saw it right where I left it; on a shelf in one of the cabinets.

All this wasted time and energy helps me refine and polish my vocabulary of Anglo Saxon blessings.

Subject: RE: BS: 2,000 and Counting
From: GUEST,999
Date: 14 Jan 13 - 10:22 AM

Jesse James was a snot-nosed kid who would have benefited greatly from a liberal dose of my Gran's knuckles.

Subject: RE: BS: 2,000 and Counting
From: ranger1
Date: 14 Jan 13 - 10:40 AM

Or one of Meg's skelps.

Subject: RE: BS: 2,000 and Counting
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 14 Jan 13 - 11:58 AM

Having a large living room with 14" square tiles made it possible to work on a grid, pull all of the books off of one large set of shelves in the front room (floor to ceiling, from one end of the room to the other, in a room that is about 14') and stack them alphabetically. I was able to cull several boxes of duplicates. Those shelves are still full and there are many other shelves in the house.

I think if I were going to catalog them I'd use the LibraryThing software to have some interactive resources. Those who use the for-fee program, how do you use it?

SRS

Subject: RE: BS: 2,000 and Counting
From: Charmion
Date: 14 Jan 13 - 12:16 PM

I recently did a drastic cull of our accumulation of novels, largely to reduce the need for dusting volumes that do nothing but collect dust. I find I still read novels, but I seem to have stopped re-reading them. Edmund is a re-reader, so he keeps his, but more and more we are converting to electronic form.

The e-reader is fine for novels and short stories, but I find it less than excellent for non-fiction, especially history. All those lovingly provided photographs, maps, footnotes and other supporting materials just don't come through well in the cheaper e-readers, such as my beloved Kobo, and even an iPad can't display fold-out campaign maps, the highlight of the better class of military history books.

Subject: RE: BS: 2,000 and Counting
From: Owen Woodson
Date: 15 Jan 13 - 05:58 AM

I forgot to mention the messy bit. A small number of books were packed in a corner of the house that I hadn't been in in the devil knows how long. Pulling the books off the shelf, I found them covered in acres of dust and cobwebs. And by 'eck. You should have seen those silverfish scarper. Eeeughh.

Subject: RE: BS: 2,000 and Counting
From: Charmion
Date: 15 Jan 13 - 09:00 AM

In a previous abode, the study had a bookcase built into what had once been a window-frame. It was the only bookcase in the room with shelves strong enough for my copy of the 9th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (with American appendices), a wonderful core-sample of the Victorian world view published in 1900. Half calf, 26 volumes. Weighed a ton.

Alas and alack, one day I took down Volume 6 from the top shelf and found the page edges damp and the leather mouldy. The bricked-up window was leaking, and the result was destruction.

My father, an ex-librarian who should have known better, stowed books and LP records in the basement of the same house, using shelves built up against the limestone foundation. What a disaster! When he died, I had to hire a dumpster to haul it all away, weeping with allergies and chagrin the whole time.

Subject: RE: BS: 2,000 and Counting
From: Elmore
Date: 15 Jan 13 - 08:37 PM

In the seventies I had a considerable number of lp's. My ex wife slipped me a pill of some sort, and in a couple of hours I had them arranged by artist in alphabetical and chronological order.

Subject: RE: BS: 2,000 and Counting
From: GUEST,999
Date: 16 Jan 13 - 11:54 AM

". . . and in a couple of hours I had them arranged by artist in alphabetical and chronological order."

Was that in the day when polyethylene injection-molded milk cartons (used to carry a dozen quart containers or so) held a gang of LPs? Dang. When Canada went metric, the cases became about 1/4" too small to hold them and that heralded the end of organized music collections in this country.

Subject: RE: BS: 2,000 and Counting
From: GUEST,999
Date: 16 Jan 13 - 11:57 AM

Well, in my house, anyway. Where I used to say "That record's in one of the milk containers" I then had to say, "That record is in this room."

Subject: RE: BS: 2,000 and Counting
From: Charmion
Date: 16 Jan 13 - 01:54 PM

I still have half a dozen of those plastic milk crates, Brucie. They are kept under lock and key, you betcha.