(no subject)

[ellarien]

I just peeked into a certain newsgroup, which I still do at least briefly most days, and found a mention of bookstores shelving books alphabetically by title within a given author. Oddly enough, this is something that, until it came to my attention elsenet a couple of weeks ago, had never -- in a lifetime of spending as much time as possible in bookstores -- occurred to me as a conceivable way of doing things. I suppose it makes a twisted kind of sense for busy shelf-fillers, and if I manage to remember it while browsing it might occasionally save me a few seconds, but to me as a reader it makes about as much sense as shelving by publisher or spine color. (At home, I go alphabetical by author within broad categories, and mostly by publication date within authors. If I want the next book in a given series, I don't want to have to remember the title first, or scan the whole shelf checking inside for publication dates.)


Is there anyone out there who does the alpha-by-title thing at home?

Comments

[gwyneira.livejournal.com]

Hm. I organize by category first, then alpha by author, then by whatever seems best to me: by series, of course, if the author writes in series; by publication date, particularly if I have a tendency to read that author chronologically; and sometimes, yep, by title. It all depends, and I don't suppose anyone but me could actually go to my shelves and find anything easily -- even G. usually asks me where things are.

[ellarien]

Your collection's five or ten times larger than mine, I think. (I "only" have around 1200 books in a two-bedroom, 900-square-foot apartment, about half of them in the room I'm sitting in as I type, so I can get by without being completely organized.) Shelving by title just never presented itself to me as a possibility, though when I was very young and had only a few dozen books I did do shelving-by-publisher to a certain extent, grouping books that "matched" as much as possible rather than going for any particular order.

[gwyneira.livejournal.com]

I just went over 5000 total not too long ago, and they're scattered all over my house -- I think I have books in every single room (eight plus the upstairs hallway) except the bathrooms.

I occasionally think about doing some shelving by publisher, because it would be nice to have all my Persephones and Viragos together, but it would mean splitting up authors, which I can't quite bring myself to do.

[ellarien]

I still -- see comment to mrissa below -- tend to group by publisher/design within author if there isn't an overriding factor.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Alpha by author, then title. This is because they voted us into a matriarchy and so have to live with the consequences; I didn't vote for the matriarchy and might well have lost if it had come right down to title vs. pub date without it.

[ellarien]

Okay. So FOTR, ROTK, Silmarillion, TTT?

(It's too early in the morning to work out how to express bogglement without coming across as hostile, so please take it as read that I find such differences interesting rather than threatening.)

(Yes, it's 9.30 am here. I haven't finished my first cup of coffee yet.)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

That's a special case, because we have LOTR in a single volume. The chronicles of Narnia are another special case, because we have a boxed set for them, and so they can't have the Space Trilogy interspersed with them, so they're in the real order (not the numbers on the spines--it's a new enough boxed set that they've labeled The Magician's Nephew as #1, which is just wrong).

But Lloyd Alexander has:
The Beggar Queen
The Black Cauldron
The Book of Three
The Castle of Llyr
The Drackenburg Adventure
The El Dorado Adventure
The High King
The Illyrian Adventure
The Jedera Adventure
The Kestrel
The Philadelphia Adventure
Taran Wanderer
Westmark
The Xanadu Adventure

[writerknv.livejournal.com]

I do! I'm completely anal about my books. But then, I used to work in a bookstore, too.

[ellarien]

I'm fairly picky about mine, too, but it would drive me buggy to have series shelved out of story order.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

What if story order is not purely linear?

[ellarien]

Like the Vlad Taltos series? Publication order. I am not completely consistent about this, though; matching covers tend to trump more subtle considerations. For example, the Bernard Cornwell Sharpe series, where he went back and wrote interstitial books years later, I have in story order for the matching set of Penguin editions, and then the later-published ones grouped together, with the prequel mini-series before the main run and the most recent, hardcover ones after.

(Edit: after I got home and checked, I realized that in fact that is not how the Cornwell books are; in fact, apart from all the orange Penguins being together and in numerical order, I'm not sure what the organizing principle is supposed to be. Entropy is gaining on me! Aiieee!]

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

That would alarm me greatly.

[ellarien]

It worries me, a little, and I'm definitely overdue for an organizing pass. But they're my shelves (in my bedroom, in the Cornwell case), and I've never had much trouble finding anything that's where I put it on purpose. (If I put things down absentmindedly where they don't belong, it's a bit more difficult.)