Now, children, what shall we do with these shelves...?

[desperance]

I built the shelves; I filled them. I quail, at the thought of how often I am going to have to do this, to get all the books reshelved. That's twenty-four linear feet of shelving, and - well, I suppose it might be one-twentieth of the collection. Might be. I'm not good at judging quantity, but I usually underestimate.

Maybe I should use this opportunity, this process, to LibraryThing the collection? That might encourage me to filter, even - 'cos some of these books, it would be hard to admit publicly to their ownership. And even this evening, I did find a few that I thought maybe I could let go. If I were strict with myself. It's that thing where you find you have vol three of an indeterminate series that you've never read; that's a fairly pointless position, and the alternatives are either to make a serious effort to find at least vol one, or else to pass it on to someone else. Like that. It happens a lot, on my shelves; I've picked up so many random books, one way or another.

But. They are my books. I know few things about myself, but this is one: that I keep my books. Even those I dislike, even those I'm fairly sure by now I'll never read. They are my books; I keep them.

Now I have to find a home for countless old videos, that were squeezed onto the old shelves in front of the books. That's going to be a recurrent problem, for the old shelves were deep and allowed of double-stacking. Not so the new ones. Sigh. Too much stuff. If I can't winnow books, maybe I can winnow videos...?

Comments

[beckyzoole.livejournal.com]

I'm told that if you have a lot of books, it really makes sense to use the cue-cat bar-code scanner for LibraryThing.

I used to have one that I'd gotten free as part of a promotion, and eventually threw out because I never used it. Now I'll have to spend $20 to get another one. (I'm the midst of moving books and LT-ing them, too.)

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Hmmph - sounds fab, bet it doesn't work with Linux...

[affreca.livejournal.com]

Actually, I suspect they do. I remember when the cue-cats came out as free promotion, and the linux geeks I knew playing with them. Something about "so now I have a barcode scanner, what can I do with it."

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Oh, cool - thank you! *departs, in search of cue-cats* (Well, hell, they're called cue-cats...)

[julesjones]

They often have them on the LT website itself, and I believe they can be convinced to work with Linux. I keep meaning to get one myself, but haven't gotten around to it yet.

Ah yes: $20 international shipping:
http://www.librarything.com/cuecat

[durham-rambler.livejournal.com]

That's quite a mark-up, since in 2005 you could buy them for 30c each. (But you had to buy half a million to get that price.) That link also refers you on to a page with Linux resources, and a very funny letter to a lawyer.

[esmeraldus-neo.livejournal.com]

Oh, man I had one of those too...you mean it eventually DID come in useful? The one thing I ever got rid of CAME IN USEFUL?

Damn.