Given the extraordinary heat this early in July and the promise of a classic "long, hot summer," I'm going to retreat to my leather sofa, as in this 850-sq.ft. space my library has been wrapped around me since setting up. As a matter of fact, before moving furniture from the old place, I settled in first with a sleeping bag and a dozen unbuilt bookcases in their cardboard packing boxes.
Today, as one walks in: three five-shelf bookcases with additional shelving stacked on top. Scattered about: 15 bookcases plus board and bracket. I have even a periodicals section with stacks of Aperture, Color, Black and White, Martha Stewart Living, Playboy, Vanity Fair, Town and Country, and so on.
In the entropic way of things, administration (which includes riding herd on acquisitions funding), organization, and storage have come to consume time or money. Such work should be a pleasure, but in a small space and far from anything like a basement for forgetting things too bothersome to manage, there's no dodging the inventory and the want of taking stock and organizing it.
Today's lesson follows on two years of fretting over how to better catalog a personal library of more than 2,000 volumes.
I have worked with and contue adding data within the context of an aesthetically delightful software product called "Book Collector". I even have the barcode reader for it, and that makes quick local work of new purchases. Somewhere in my future, Book Collector may also synch with gadgets to provide in-store data while shopping to avoid duplicate purchases. For old fogeymind here, that may one day come in handy (as soon as I upgrade my old, unreliable, possibly high-frequency cancer-causing Motoroloa construction-tough cell phone).
But back to the lesson and this may wreck your post-modern day: the absolute best way (educate me otherwise, please) I have found to develop my library's catalog seems to involve sitting down with a stack of books and filling out 3x5 index cards.
The more things change . . . .
On the high-tech end, I have also fiddled with Microsoft Access and Excel databasing (also Book Collector's export tools) and found the same handy for compiling data (duh?!) but not for communicating, for eventually, whether at Amazon or Facebook or some other community or for some other purpose, one may want to share the means by which one's mind and perception have been enriched by one's life among books.
One day, I will publish the PDF or a set of them, but today my fiddling with library science has brought me to MS Word, which provides reverse indentation and automated A-Z sorting, a godsend, and output in Adobe PDF form.
Age, sad to say, has led me to discover some hidden categories in the personal library: books acquired but not read, for example; also books read, even read with enthusiasm, but not remembered.
What to do in one's fifties?
I cannot read back through my collection.
It is too large for any but a completely invalided and isolated spirit--and then, were I that, I would not find it satisfying reading solely old books.
Highly recommended reading for fellow bibliophiles: Alberto Manguel's The Library at Night.
Here, disorganized (parsing is going to be the problem, also known as "the next step", when dealing with a bibliography containing above 2,000 items) is the little start I've made on this part of inventory.
For better or worse, I suspect, all the themes are present in the short list. The completed one may prove only elaborating.
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Aleichem, Shalom. Collected Stories of Shalom Aleichem: Tevye’s Daughters. New York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1949. Notes: 4th Printing, Pristine, DeLuxe Illustrated Edition, Inherited.
Aleichem, Shalom. Collected Stories of Shalom Aleichem: The Old Country. Julius and Frances Butwin, Translators. Ben Shahn, Illustrator. DeLuxe Illustrated Edition. New York: Crown Publishers, Inc. 1946. Notes: Ninth Printing, Pristine, Inherited.
Archer, Jeffrey. To Cut a Long Story Short. New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 2000. Notes: First Edition, Excellent Condition, $25 new, ISBN: 006018552x.
Arendt, Hannah. The Life of the Mind. Volumes I and II, Boxed Set. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971. Notes: First Edition, Very Good Condition, Amazon, ISBN 0-15-151895-5.
Bar-Zohar. Ben-Gurion: A Biography. Peretz Kidron, Translator. The New Millennium Edition. Tel Aviv: Magal Books, 1978. Notes: Hebrew editions, unabridged, published in 1977 and 2000, $129, Amazon, ISBN 9048203.
Burgess, Anthony. The Devil’s Mode: Stories by Anthony Burgess. New York: Random House, 1989. Notes: First Edition, Purchased Used, $4.50, Very Good Condition, some dj wear, ISBN: 039456705.
Capote, Truman. Music for Chameleons: New Writing by Truman Capote. New York: Random House, 1980. Notes: No cover, earlier edition dates from 1979, Very Good Condition, ISBN: 0394508262.
Chayes, Sarah. The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan After the Taliban. New York: The Penguin Press, 2006.
Cheever, John. The Stories of John Cheever. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978. Notes: Purchased Used, $1.90, Market Value: $10.50; Very Good Condition with minor DJ wear, ISBN: 0394500873.
Davenport-Hines, Richard. Vice: An Anthology. New York: Viking, 1994. Notes: First American Edition, Printed in England, Purchased New: $27.95, As New Condition, ISBN: 0670855480.
McCurry, Steve. Looking East. New York: Phaidon Press, 2006. Notes: Photography, $39.95, ISBN 07124846376.
McInerney, Jay. How It Ended: New and Collected Stories. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009, First Edition, $25.95, Excellent Condition, ISBN: 9780307268051.
Newton, Helmut. Playboy: Helmut Newton. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2005. Notes: First Edition, Photography, ISBN: 081185065x.
Phillips, Melanie. Londonistan. New York: Encounter Books, 2006. Notes: First Edition, Amazon, 9/9, ISBN 1594031444
Plisson, Philip. The Sea. Yann Queffelee, Preface. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 2002. Notes: $45, Photography, Coffee Table, ISBN: 0810935384.
Shirer, William L. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960. Notes: First Printing, Book of the Month Club, LCC 60-6729, Good Condition.
Spirn, Anne Whiston. Daring to Look: Dorothea Lange’s Photographs and Reports from the Field. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2008. Notes: Nora Roberts Store, Boonsboro, 8/30/08, $40, ISBN-13: 9780226769844.
Steiner, Jean-Francois. Treblinka. Preface by Simone De Beauvoir; Helen Weaver, Translator. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967. Notes: English Language Edition, First Printing, Inherited, Good Condition, DJ worn, LCC 67-14236.
Wiesenthal, Simon. The Murderers Among Us: The Simon Wiesenthal Memoirs. Joseph Wechsberg, Editor. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1967. Notes: 2nd Printing, Very Good Condition, DJ minor wear, inherited, LCC 67-13204.
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There is a rough start.
I have more cards to transcribe and thousands, literally, to write--not a job one tackles full-time without being beneath the roof of a paying institution. Still, now and then, I may work through a fixed shelf of 24 books or so, and that's how it will get done--the old fashioned way with "gel ink" Parker ballpoints, file cards, file card boxes, and a generous spirit.
Beware, I must tell myself: among the bookcases alone, I count 75 shelves.
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