What a coincidence, I just bought enough shelves for my new flat so that I can take the books out of boxes from the move (those that haven't already escaped) and sort them out properly.
Genres are just as useless in literature as they are in music. So I don't even try to have 'fiction' (says who?) vs 'non-fiction' (ditto) categorisation. Instead I split them into reference vs bedtime. Books that I would actually read straight through are kept separately from those I'd pull off the shelf and flip through looking for something. Occasionally books shift from one category to another, or lean precariously across the gap, I take "The Diamond Age" off the shelf to check how old the protagonist is when she first gets the book, and an hour later I'm reading about Dinosaur's story of how he became the last of his kind, a story I already know by heart.
Reference works... "Alice in Wonderland" an illustrated & annotated Good News Bible "The C Programming language"
Bedtime reading... "Why I hate Saturn" "The Mythical Man Month" "Dr Bloodmoney"
Obviously libraries can't use this system because people's ideas of what fits into what category would vary, although this doesn't seem to have stopped them with their existing genres. There are probably several reasons why so few of Stanisław Lem's works* had been taken out for 5-10 years from the Central library. Obviously being down in the stacks doesn't help today, but most likely they'd previously languished in "fiction" a category which is the kiss of death to speculative authors whose fans are sifting through the Star Wars books in the Science Fiction genre ghetto on the other side of the library. Out of everything he wrote in English, the only books on Southampton's open shelves these days are movie-jacket versions of Solaris and his literary criticism.
* In English, the ones available in their original language have benefited from a significantly increased audience in recent years, but those are of no interest to me, it's hard enough to keep up with his thinking in English translation, my few words of Polish wouldn't serve well enough to know what Imaginary Magnitude is even about in Polish.
Realities of book ownership say that size is a factor, large books not only need more space, they also threaten to hide or crush their smaller brethren, particularly pamphlets. So that has to override my other ideas on how to store books. Also I'm not obsessed enough to stick strictly to any rules, the whole pattern makes sense, but individual instances may deviate.
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zvi and
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Date: 2007-07-15 01:17 pm (UTC)Genres are just as useless in literature as they are in music. So I don't even try to have 'fiction' (says who?) vs 'non-fiction' (ditto) categorisation. Instead I split them into reference vs bedtime. Books that I would actually read straight through are kept separately from those I'd pull off the shelf and flip through looking for something. Occasionally books shift from one category to another, or lean precariously across the gap, I take "The Diamond Age" off the shelf to check how old the protagonist is when she first gets the book, and an hour later I'm reading about Dinosaur's story of how he became the last of his kind, a story I already know by heart.
Reference works...
"Alice in Wonderland"
an illustrated & annotated Good News Bible
"The C Programming language"
Bedtime reading...
"Why I hate Saturn"
"The Mythical Man Month"
"Dr Bloodmoney"
Obviously libraries can't use this system because people's ideas of what fits into what category would vary, although this doesn't seem to have stopped them with their existing genres. There are probably several reasons why so few of Stanisław Lem's works* had been taken out for 5-10 years from the Central library. Obviously being down in the stacks doesn't help today, but most likely they'd previously languished in "fiction" a category which is the kiss of death to speculative authors whose fans are sifting through the Star Wars books in the Science Fiction genre ghetto on the other side of the library. Out of everything he wrote in English, the only books on Southampton's open shelves these days are movie-jacket versions of Solaris and his literary criticism.
* In English, the ones available in their original language have benefited from a significantly increased audience in recent years, but those are of no interest to me, it's hard enough to keep up with his thinking in English translation, my few words of Polish wouldn't serve well enough to know what Imaginary Magnitude is even about in Polish.
Realities of book ownership say that size is a factor, large books not only need more space, they also threaten to hide or crush their smaller brethren, particularly pamphlets. So that has to override my other ideas on how to store books. Also I'm not obsessed enough to stick strictly to any rules, the whole pattern makes sense, but individual instances may deviate.