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Feb. 13th, 2008 06:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ellarienFurther to the shelving discussion:
1) I made a point of checking in the campus bookstore today. It turns out they do their SFF section by series order. General fiction books are something closer to alpha-by-title, but I'm not sure of the logic behind putting Villette before Jane Eyre. This makes me feel a bit better about not having previously noticed that title was a field on which one could sort fiction, as I hang out in the SFF section much more than anywhere else.
2) I can sort of see the advantages of sorting by title within author; at least it's unambiguous. On the other hand, it results in too many infelicities for me to be comfortable with it as anything but the lowest-priority, when-all-else-fails sort key. I'm too fond of having series together in their reading order, and similar editions grouped together for aesthetic reasons, to want to start breaking those associations for the sake of mere titles.
3) My personal system ... is personal, quirky, and somewhat contingent; parts of it date back to days when I owned fewer books than I now have in my to-read pile. Also, I need to sort out my bookshelves one of these days, before too much more entropy creeps in.
4) I'm now pondering the merits of writing books in alphabetical order. I can think of at least one author who does that; I don't really think this is to avoid having either alphabetically-minded people or chronologically-minded people shelve them in an order she doesn't prefer, but it could be.
1) I made a point of checking in the campus bookstore today. It turns out they do their SFF section by series order. General fiction books are something closer to alpha-by-title, but I'm not sure of the logic behind putting Villette before Jane Eyre. This makes me feel a bit better about not having previously noticed that title was a field on which one could sort fiction, as I hang out in the SFF section much more than anywhere else.
2) I can sort of see the advantages of sorting by title within author; at least it's unambiguous. On the other hand, it results in too many infelicities for me to be comfortable with it as anything but the lowest-priority, when-all-else-fails sort key. I'm too fond of having series together in their reading order, and similar editions grouped together for aesthetic reasons, to want to start breaking those associations for the sake of mere titles.
3) My personal system ... is personal, quirky, and somewhat contingent; parts of it date back to days when I owned fewer books than I now have in my to-read pile. Also, I need to sort out my bookshelves one of these days, before too much more entropy creeps in.
4) I'm now pondering the merits of writing books in alphabetical order. I can think of at least one author who does that; I don't really think this is to avoid having either alphabetically-minded people or chronologically-minded people shelve them in an order she doesn't prefer, but it could be.
