(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.