(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

[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