Library, Thing, Done

Well, and Your Humble Blogger mentioned some time ago that we were going to catalogue the books in the house. And I have. I chose Library Thing, and although I don’t really care very much about having my library public, I have chosen for now to make it public, so you can see it for yourself. It turns out that we have a thousand books, very nearly, of which more than a third are on the shelves of My Perfect Non-Reader and the Youngest Member. Many (well, most) of those books were not originally brought into the house for those particular children. Some of them were bought by YHB and my Best Reader for our own amusement, because we like children’s books. Some were given to us before we had children, because many of our friends know we like children’s books. And two hundred or so were from the youth my Best Reader, whose mother Saves Things, bless her.

Nowadays publishers put the ISBN on the back cover, which makes entry nice and fast, but once upon a time publishers put the book’s ISBN or SBN or Library of Congress Catalog Card Number only on the back of the title page, which requires opening up the book. Of course, there are some books that have no number worth talking about, and need to be searched for by title and author, quelle horreur. Anyway, these older books require actually opening the book and looking at them, which slows a fellow down, but can be rewarding. Particularly as Your Humble Blogger didn’t actually have all of these books in his own bookish childhood, so this is the first time that I’ve opened some of them. My favorite find of these was from the First Book Of series put out by Franklin Watts in the fifties, a book called The First Book of the West Indies, by Langston Hughes. The book was published in 1956, and contains lots of useful information about Cuba, Trinidad, Haiti, the Dominican Islands, Jamaica, Curacao, and the other islands in the chain. Well, not terribly useful. Interesting. And, unsurprisingly, out of date. Mr. Hughes makes no mention of General Batista, much less Fidel Castro whose permanent revolution was already beginning. They also Some Famous Men and Women of West Indian Birth, including such baseball players as Minnie Minoso and Vic Power, although nobody from, say, the Dominican Republic.

Anyway, I’m done. I’ve entered everything we have in the house, except a few dozen of my Best Reader’s books that are on the way into her office as soon as we remember to take them. There are still a few boxes of books in my mother-in-law’s barn, but I’d say less than two hundred books altogether, possibly much less. We’ll collect and unpack those after we move sometimes and I’ll enter them then. And, of course, we keep adding books. It’s Tag Sale time in New England, so in the last two weeks we’ve added about thirty books. But as I was going through our collection I set aside three books to be donated, so that’s all right.

My collection is fairly obscure for LibraryThings; half the stuff in my house is shared by less then a hundred people. Er, that is, for each book, when you look at how many other people list it in their LibraryThing, half of the books are under the 100-other-people mark. On the other hand, I have three of the five books most commonly owned, and in fact I own the other two, but they’re still in boxes in my mother-in-law’s barn. On the other other hand, those five are all Harry Potter books, so there’s not much to that. It’s interesting to me to see what books are popular with LibraryThings and what books are less so, and what I have and what I don’t. The only books we don’t own in the top 25 (not counting the Harry Potters) are 1984, which my mother-in-law owns and is actually sitting on the nightstand in the room we use when we visit; The Great Gatsby, which I read and didn’t like enough to keep around; The DaVinci Code, which my Best Reader eventually read but I haven’t, and which we certainly aren’t paying money for; The Catcher in the Rye, which I should probably read again sometime to see if I like it any better now; Jane Eyre, which both my Best Reader and I thought we owned, and which might yet turn up in the barn; Brave New World, which I will probably buy if I see it at a library sale, now that I know we don’t own a copy; Life of Pi, which my Best Reader read from the library but I didn’t; Angels and Demons, again Dan Brown; Wuthering Heights, which I have never read and probably should; One Hundred Years of Solitude, the only one on the top 25 that neither my Best Reader nor I have ever read; and The Time Traveler’s Wife, which we both enjoyed enough to buy at a library sale sometime, if we see it. We own 15 out of 25, maybe more, and have (between us) read all but one of the others.

But once you get past the top ten, which 7,000 out of the 200,000 LibraryThingers have, you drop pretty quick. In my own library, only 26 books are shared by more than 5,000 libraries, only 78 by more than 2,000, and only 142 by more than 1,000. The 143rd is an obscure little book called Kidnapped, by Robert Louis Stevenson. The other 850 or so are in less than one out of every 200 libraries in the thing. Except, of course, those numbers change all the time, and I have no idea if they’re even accurate, anyway. Heck, they could just be dropping in random numbers, for all I know.

Oh, and I’m going to try dropping in a widget here

Did that work?

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.