Logomacy
Between logomachy and logomancy…

528 books cataloged, 4 bookcases complete, 17 bookcases to go. Several of them are full of manga and comic collections, though, so that might wait til a second pass…

I’m discovering books that I had forgotten I owned, or had thought I lost. Would I have bought that hardcover Ultimate Hitchhikers Guide if I had known that I still had all three of the original paperbacks, scattered about? Well, possibly, since it was on sale for only $16 dollars, but still. It doesn’t help that I have most of my paperbacks doubled up on the shelves (with paperbacks that I doubt I’ll ever reread on their sides beneath the back row so that I can at least glimpse the spines of the back row). I’m thinking that once I finish cataloging, if I pack away most of the trashiest of the paperbacks and the things that I can’t imagine ever looking at (am I ever going to consult the Handbook of Employee Benefits again? I don’t think so. Ditto for Patterns in Java, Volume 2) I might be able to free up an entire bookshelf. Bliss.

I was up past midnight last night cataloging, and I’ve gotten 237 books done. That’s approximately the builtin bookcase next to the fireplace, plus the top two shelves of the bookcase next to the computer (which are stacked two deep w/paperbacks). I’m trying to be methodical about it, otherwise I know I’ll end up skipping bunches, so I’m going shelf-by-shelf, doing the complete shelf even if it means entering the book manually (mostly the older paperbacks, that don’t have a Library of Congress listing or an ISBN number). I’m skipping the manga for now. I’m thinking of reshelving them, or storing them some other way anyway, and I’ve already discovered that works in multiple volumes appear in LibraryThing as duplicated (my lovely four-volume set of A Dance to the Music of Time revealed this to me), so I don’t know whether I’m going to bother to catalog the manga. If I do I may just do one volume per series, and use the notes to indicate the volumes I have. I’m also trying not to get to compulsive about exactly which edition I have; most of the genre paperbacks are found on Amazon instead of in the Library of Congress, and Amazon tends to list only the most recent printing unless somebody is selling a used copy through zShops. I try to make sure that it’s at least the right publisher, but even then I think there are some slip-ups.

I’ve added a widget in the sidebar that displays random books from my library, via “LibraryThing”:http://librarything.com Cool, ne? Hacking the WordPress template wasn’t hard, but figuring out exactly where to hack was a pain in the _tuchis_.