(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

[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.)