Wow! This is nuts! And this is nuts in a different way! Fortunately, Scott McLemee, Chad Orzel, Josh Rosenau and Brian Switek bring in some reality to the topic: what goes on the living-room bookshelf? Commenters chime in. Good stuff. Read it.
So, what are "rules" in the Coturnix house?
First, the house is too small to allow too much fine planning as to what the guests will see.
Second, we do not have guests very often (again, lack of space), so the bookshelves are not aimed at them.
Third, we have about 5000 books and they have to be stored somewhere, in some fashion.
Fourth, we have moved twice in the last 5 years, so the "rules" had to change, due to changes in available space.
Fifth, it never occured to me that a bookshelf is any kind of statement about me, though perhaps it is not true: I do like the rare guests to look at the books. It is not so much that I want to impress them with Great Literature, but I do like to brag about some rare gems I found serendipitously at second-hand bookstores and yardsales.
Sixth, I would never be so presumptuous to call the library mine - it is ours, we are a family, and all the books belong to each of us.
When people have a bad time and need to lift themselves up, or if they have good times and need to celebrate, they usually go out to eat at a good restaurant. My wife and I? We go to a bookstore. Food comes at one orifice and leaves on another. Books stay forever.
Do we ever get rid of books? Yes, we pack up a couple of boxes and sell them a few times a year. Kiddie books outgrown by our kids get sent to younger nephews and nieces. How do we choose what to get rid of? Books we did not like, and know will not like, and, importantly, do not think our kids will ever care to read.
How are the books organized? Right now, total chaos. Almost. Each kid has a shelf in his/her own room. All the physics book and chess books are in my son's room, for instance. All the SF is on a shelf in our bedroom, next to my side of the bed. There is also a big "to read soon" shelf in our bedroom. There are also four other big shelves in our bedroom populated mainly by fiction, plus some books about the Balkans and some Judaica. Those used to be oganized in the alphabetical order by author, but are a mess right now - it's a project for the near future. There are eight large and one small bookshelf in the living room, populuated by non-fiction, textbooks and reference books. Right now they are a mess, but they used to be organized by topic. An entire line of Darwin, another row is just SJ Gould, about two shelves are philosophy, lots of evolution, ecology, behavior, physiology, and also art, film, sociology, politics. It did make sense, trust me.
Oh, BTW, I built all the shelves myself.
So, what decides what books are kept? Books useful for reference, daily blogging, or study. Books we liked and hope our kids will read one day. Books of historical value. Book we intend to read. It's actually pretty simple, and does not really involve impressing guests (though we appreciate it when the guests are impressed by the sheer numbers).
So, what's your book-keeping/shelving method?
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"Oh, BTW, I built all the shelves myself."
Hey, where are the pics of your shelves.
As someone commented at one of the linked pages, if I can keep the library books organized enough to keep them out of the 'house' books I am happy.
...tom...
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Perhaps I should take some pics...tomorrow in daylight?
In general, I'm not a nosy person, but I do love reading about other peoples' book collections, and looking at what kinds of books friends have in their collections, when I visit their houses or apartments. I used to house-sit and pet-sit for my professors, when I was a grad student; while I wouldn't have dreamed of looking through medicine cabinets, drawers, or closets (and I wasn't interested to do so, in fact, the idea alone made me squeamish), I *did* give all the bookshelves a very thorough nose-through.
I'm afraid I'm pretty obsessive-compulsive when it comes to organizing my books at home, though I don't know how many I have total. Lots and lots. They're organized by authors and by topics, for the most part. Proust, Trollope, Dickens, Eliot, Steinbeck, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, SJ Gould, Edward Abbey, Rachel Carson, the Beats, Romantic poets, Latin American magic realism, Rushdie, JRR Tolkien, Terry Pratchett, etc. All of the Norse mythology, Icelandic sagas, Eddas, and Arthurian romances are on a shelf below the Tolkien collection. James Joyce gets his own special section, along with a cherished copy of Gilbert's James Joyce's "Ulysses". My collection of bird books and field guides takes up two shelves, and my horse books take up one long shelf. Another long shelf holds my books on Buddhism and yoga. The embroidery, knitting, crochet, and quilting books are scattered amongst various projects that I like to start, but often don't finish.
I'm not competent at building shelves, so I heart Ikea. ;-)
I gave away all my horse books to a friend some ten years ago when she bought a new horse and I had the second kid (bye-bye riding for a long time). I wish I could have them back - some are old classics, like Vladimir Littaeur and Alois Podhajski books. But she is incommunicado these days, I think somewhere up in Connecticut.
Ah, I keep forgetting, whenever I write about books, to sneak in somewhere a link to my amazon wish list.... ;-)
I have Littauer's Schooling Your Horse; like most of my horse books, I picked it up cheaply at a used bookstore. I used to have a wonderful book on polo, which someone borrowed and never returned, unfortunately. >:-( It had great old photos of famous polo players, male and female, and legendary polo horses. It also had Rudyard Kipling's polo pony story The Maltese Cat, which will make even the toughest macho ten-goaler all weepy and sentimental. In fact, a friend of mine and I were banned from reading snippets of it out loud during breaks, while announcing chukkahs at arena polo matches.
They had good reason to be proud, and better reason to be afraid, all twelve of them; for, though they had fought their way, game by game, up the teams entered for the polo tournament, they were meeting the Archangels that afternoon in the final match; and the Archangels' men were playing with half-a-dozen ponies apiece. As the game was divided into six quarters of eight minutes each, that meant a fresh pony after every halt. The Skidars' team, even supposing there were no accidents, could only supply one pony for every other change; and two to one is heavy odds. Again, as Shiraz, the grey Syrian, pointed out, they were meeting the pink and pick of the polo-ponies of Upper India; ponies that had cost from a thousand rupees each, while they themselves were a cheap lot gathered, often from country carts, by their masters who belonged to a poor but honest native infantry regiment.
Loved the 'Maltese Cat'. It was in one of the horse story collections I had back in Belgrade. All the books I had there I gave to my old trainer, I only took a couple with me to the USA.
The Maltese Cat is available online here, Coturnix. Not as nice without the illustrations in the old polo book I had, though. The best one was of The Cat poking his "wise little, grey little head" through the window at the end.
Excuse me, I need Kleenexes now... ;-)
I think it should be a universal rule that in whatever room the family eats most of its meals, there should be a shelf of books for quick reference to settle disputes in conversation, etc. This should include a good dictionary, an atlas, the latest edition of the World Almanac & Book of Facts, and probably a copy of the Merck Manual. If there's room, any other reference books should go there.
When I was growing up, our house had a dining room, and that was also where my brother and I did our homework for school. Having the reference books right there made it "no big deal" to look something up, which I'm sure helped our grades.
Barn Owl: Aaaaah! Thank you.
chezjake: in our last three homes, the living room and the dining room are really subidivisions of one large space, thus all the reference books, including Merck, are very close to the dinner table ;-)
We have a digital system involving numbers and boxes and digital photos.
As for reference in the kitchen. That is what we have. No Merck, but I will add it next time it is weeded from the library.
chezjake: You are so right! Even with only two of us at the kitchen table, the surface is often so cluttered with references that there's barely room for the food. Still, we often end up taking plates into his office or mine, to resolve the argument with online research.
Cold food is a small price to pay for being proved right.
Managing you books is a very difficult matter and you want to show them it is more difficult. There are many problems which occur in front of one while showing your books. I too faced the same problem when I wanted to show all my comic books but not able to because we had a very small house.
Managing you books is a very difficult matter and you want to show them it is more difficult. There are many problems which occur in front of one while showing your books. I too faced the same problem when I wanted to show all my comic books but not able to because we had a very small house.
Since November, I've given away almost a cubic meter of books (planning to move to a much, much smaller space)....
I donated my equestrian library to a local college that has a horse-management program. I kept the old classics.
For every cubic unit of horse books, I had 0.5 units of gardening. They went to the local community college that has a horticulture certificate program.
I also had a 30-year collection of cookbooks. Ruthless purging, to the great delight of my friends. 90% reduction in linear feet.
There are bookshelves in every room of my house. So I used that schema to organize. Books on learning, learning disabilities, and remediating LDs are in room A. Reference is in room B. And so on.
The fiction shelves are alphabetical by author. The subject shelves are grouped (roughly) by topic and/or author, depending on how I recall. That is I don't necessarily think about (say) reading remediation by author, but by subject, so books on that subject are clumped together.
Who am I to say that Matt Selman's rules are weird? He lives in a highly competitive environment -- I don't. But then again, when I am invited to somebody's house for the first time, the first thing I do is, scan the bookshelves (if any). If no books are on display, I wonder if this person and I have anything in common.
I'd modify Karen's statement about cold food as follows:
Cheap vegetarian food is a small price to pay for having lots of books in the house.
And I realized that my link to The Maltese Cat has an unnecessary forward slash at the end of the URL, which effectively kills the link. Sorry! Maybe I need a book on writing html code....
We're currently arranging our books by colour, which looks pleasing from across the room, but it may not last. Cookbooks go separately, because they have to be nearest the kitchen, and my beloved complete compact OED doesn't fit on any of the shelves at all.
Two transatlantic moves have slimmed down our book collection a lot, but it still seems to grow faster than we can shelve.
I have about 200 books in Canada and another 100 in boxes in my parents' attic in Holland. When I moved I was super organized and I kept a list of which book was where, but I abandoned the list a few years ago. As a result I was moping for months about not having a book (The Picture of Dorian Gray) that I thought was Holland, then moping a few more weeks when I forgot to bring it along when I was there, only to realize just this weekend that the book was in Canada all along. Now I don't remember why I needed it all these months ago...
My system for the shelved books is not too bad though (apart from the problem that I sometimes think I don't have a book when I do, but that's because I didn't properly check the shelves)
I have everything by topic, and the rough distribution of topics is: science textbooks, popular science books, art and music books, Dutch novels, English novels, Children's literature, SciFi/Fantasy (overlaps with children's lit because I ran out of space on the children's lit shelf), travel and languages, and a collection of the same book (Winnie the Pooh) in eleven or twelve different languages.
Within the topics it's mostly sorted by what looks good on the shelf. Authors are not grouped together: Bill Bryson is on both the travel shelf and the pop science shelf. Nick Hornby is on both the English novels and the music shelf (he wrote a book about his favourite songs)
Oh, and I can't believe nobody mentioned this art project yet:
http://www.superherodesigns.com/journal/archives/000453.html
Ah, a subject near and dear to my own heart (and home life). I have about 2000 books and a digital library of over 10 000 items. I'm starting to need a library cataloguing system to keep track of them all. (Does anyone know of a good program to get? No, I can't just use a spreadsheet, because some of the items are related to long-term writing projects and need to be tagged with extensive collections of keywords, and I'm really not interested in learning as much SQL as it would take to set up my own bespoke database for home.)
As for the printed matter, I have two bookcases in the bedroom -- one for science fiction and fantasy, and the other for horror, sorted alphabetically by author or editor, in the case of anthologies. I have two bookcases and a couple of wine crates acting like bookcases in my office. The large (6ft) bookcase contains my reference books and my general fiction books. The reference books are organised by a rough and idiosyncratic system of subject matter (e.g. history, languages, art and design, linguistics and rhetoric, biography, science, religion, etc.), and the general fiction is organised basically by "what will fit where." The small bookcase (which sits on the back of the giant farm-kitchen-style table I use for a desk) contains dictionaries, thesauruses, grammars, my MLA handbook, a quick reference on HTML that I use for web work, and a stack of Middle East Journals and a couple very old issues of the Bank of Israel Annual Report that I didn't have room for anywhere else. The wine crates contain specific current project-related material, like all the hard-copy source materials for my forthcoming book on streetcars, and some on medicine and systemic conditions for another future project. My major book-storage problems are that a) I'm running out of shelf space, b) I have such a weird variety of stuff, sorting it is going to require me to move to the LoC catalogue system eventually, and c) moving that many books is a PITA.
Nowadays I prefer my books in large stacks at a library. I particularly like those sliding storage-saver stacks you crank open and closed, or the rooms where they've added floors by installing metal grated floors in formerly high ceilinged rooms.
OTOH, we know from the words of Dr. Egon Spengler that print is dead (and has been since 1984).
Some great tips in these comments. A couple more: most elementary & jr.high school libraries are happy to receive contributions of children's books, definitely including non-fiction & even some foreign language.
For a free database program, it's quite incredible what some people do with genealogy programs (free: PAF, Legacy, at least). Let the great granddaddy be BOOKS. His bakers' dozen children can be named Dewey's 10 categories + fiction + whatever else, maybe fiction by language. You can use the birth, death, notes, etc fields for whatever you want. And attach photos. Locations don't have to be cities and countries, they can be rooms and bookcases (printouts available for each location).