Every few years I try to organize my library. On Tuesday, I tried to explain it to technolope and capital_l as a test to see if I’m enlightened yet. It seems to me that an enlightened human being would, at least as a start, have a decent organizational scheme for his library.
Last time I did this, I settled on sorting the books by height, to optimize shelf use. While this was effective, it left me a little cold intellectually.
Fully wary of my tendancy to pull an _earthshine_ and overthink things, I just plunged into the task and started carving out subsets of the problem.
The first, totally obvious category was “biography”. One shelf is now dedicated to biography. Awesome.
Next came “fiction”. I’ve got a hallway of shelves perfectly sized for paperback fiction, and so I started alphabetizing. This worked, except that I ran out of space. One of the shelves is just a little bit shorter than the others … perfectly sized for Tom Clancy. So, that shelf became the Clancy, Herbert, and Tolkein shelf. SCORE! ALL my fiction, all alphabetized in one place, with one small hack. Awesome.
I had one shelf left in the hallway, and my gut said that it would be perfect for something that I was thinking of as “the ancients”. This includes the Greek and Roman histories, Plato, Socrates, Dante, and so on. As I got into it, I realized that this would work really well if I allowed “philosophy” in there as well. Thus, the Bible (tempting as it was to put it under fiction …), Nietzsche, the Dalai Lama and the rest went mixing in with the ancients … and it FIT! Triple awesome!
At this point I had momentum. I had pacing, tempo … and I had considerably fewer books to worry about.
I cleared a 7 foot bookshelf and started from both ends with “Technical”. This quickly ran into a wall. There are just too many categories. I started with textbooks on the bottom, organized by topic (Algorithms, AI, Biology, Bioinformatics, Computer Architecture, Grid computing, Math, Programming, …) and technical references on the top organized similarly (C, C++, Databases, Java, Perl, Unix). It’s stalled though … so I turned to the remaining books.
“humor” was another dead simple one. One shelf. Whap. There we go. Back on track. While I was doing the simple ones, “cooking”, “travel” and home skills reference” went into place.
Back to what the bookstores might call “nonfiction:” These seem to be in two broad categories “science literature” and “social literature”. Note that my neat divisions are starting to fall apart. Both of those categories dribble into philosophy (What is Life by Schroedinger), biography and / or history (The Eighth Day of Creation by Judson), and other categories.
Further complicating matters is the fact that, like many people, I have a showpiece bookshelf where I try to put a meta-category which might be called “triumphs of the human spirit”. Here would be displayed my very favorite books from any category.
So that’s where it stands at the moment. Thanks for listening.
