One of the wittily contentious things this article proposes is how to arrange your library to attract people.
The "I'm desperate for a shag', female version
Ladies: do not listen to this at all. Should I ever enter your house (that isn't entendre, by the way), I'll go straight for your bookshelves. I may well read a book or two right then and there. Or I'll leave in high dudgeon having seen Dan Brown, Coelho, or others of that ilk. Critical theory particularly appreciated.Doesn't really require books – it's the last thing a man will notice. But on the off-chance you bring someone home who can read, it might be an idea temporarily to lose anything too intimidating by Andrea Dworkin.
Unless you're a lesbian, in which case you might like to put it on the coffee table.
What systems do you use? One or two of you, I know, will say that one's piled on top of the other one, but this is for the rest of you. Size? Genre? Degree of affection? Mark uses the Dewey Decimal system, which I respect. I'll use it when I finally get a place with enough room. I'd like a poetry corner, though that smacks of ghettoisation a little. A proper library in dark wood with a rolltop escritoire, ladders on runners, a wood fire, squashy armchairs and a card index. Someone snoozing in one corner as rain beats on the windows, a marmoset nibbling on a Jeffrey Archer in the other (my version of a shredder). A clock ticks, Radio 4 mumbles warmly from concealed speakers, a violin case sits on a side table and on another Marmite on crumpets await. I of course will be wearing a dark, three-piece tweed suit and a tie knitted by Anne Shirley, who's finally dumped that awful Gilbert cad (he turned out to have been a devotee of 'Hunnish practices').
Or, an ultra-modern German/Scandinavian-style glass and steel building, zero-carbon, naturally-ventilated, Passivhaus machine for reading in, perched on a cliff overlooking one of Norway's fjords.
Well, it beats Whitmore Reans: my place look's like Bernard's back room in Black Books, which is funny because he's right about everything as much as David Mitchell
11 comments:
OK. I have worked this out with a pencil and paper but...
Given that the average width of a 12" record is 3mm the width of 20,000 records would be 20,000 x 3mm = 60,000 mm which is 6000 cm or 60 metres. I reckon your bedroom to be about 3 metres wide which mean you would have to have one wall with 20 shelves of records all full from wall to wall. This in turn would require your room to be 20 x 30cm or 6 metres high. Allowing for a two metre height you would need to have your records wall to wall, floor to ceiling and three layers deep to accomodate 20,000 records.
I reckon if they were all seven inchs it they would still take up an entire wall.
Have you an annex I do not know about?
Possibly the count includes CDs, and the majority are 7-inch singles. It's been a long time since I counted them. My collection of 78s is at home too, as I don't have a record player for them.
I house mine by ones I've read and ones I've not read. I do have a reference section.
I can barely get into the garage because it is overrun with stacker boxes full of books, (plus a family of unwanted gnomes and a few cases of wine).
The books in current usage are on bookshelves in the house. I don’t go in for anal stuff like sorting them alphabetically etc. – they are just categorized by genre.
I keep thinking it would be better to borrow more books from the library, but it’s not the same as owning your own copy of something, and being able read it whenever you want.
Mine are alphabetical. I do have hardbacks and paperbacks seperated though. I also have a book draw, newly attributed, in which I throw anything I haven't room for, books to be read and any old crap (I'm looking at you, Hemmingway).
A book draw because I'm far too tight to purchase a bookcase and I've a tiny room.
When I'm back at home I'll be re-arranging my books into categories.
There's the sports books, the most important thing. Will be nicely sorted by sport, and will include bio/autobiographies.
Than there's the random fictional works, of which there are about 4,
then the rest can be sorted easily enough by author.
All my CDs are kept in carry cases and the containers chucked away, although I wouldn't buy a CD nowadays, computers ftw.
If I have books stacked on my desk, i.e books that I use for uni work then I pile them in size order. I like to have the largest at the bottom of the pile and the smallest at the top. It is maybe a bit wierd but I like them to look neatly stacked.
As for books on bookshelves I don't have an order really, although I tend to have the books/spines of books that look the prettiest towards the middle of the shelf.
My books are historically arranged, but not sequentially - there are blocks on different shelves; but philosophy and theory have a wall to themselves, just in case anyone cutting-edge visits (although most of these books are over 10 years old). Oversize books congregate together, disorderedly, in interstices, like anarchist cells. There are also books that have gotten wet in the past crushed under other, heavy books. I've kept them thus compressed in various ways since the great Warwickshire flood of 1997(?) but, like me, they're still wrinkly.
I was considering chronological giving my shelves a sort of 'swell of history' feel but couldn't decide what to do with books from the same year - alphabetical within year or painful research to get it all totally accurate? - and finally plumped for the old standby alphabetical. You know where you (and more importantly your books) are that way.
So many systems, and all so logical in their own way. I like Natural Blues's arrangement-by-prettiness. I wondered about doing them by order of purchase, which would give you a kind of narrative of my life, but it's too late to remember what I bought when. There would be patches of hardbacks when I've had money, of paperbacks when I've had to wait, and of battered second-hand paperbacks when I've been really poor, not that I'm a snob about used books as opposed to, say, underwear.
I have a typically convoluted system which has to be implemented rigidly or I get all antsy!
Fiction: Strictly alphabetical by author then chronological within that - there can be no variation!
Non-fiction: Grouped into relatively broad subjects (eg. art, biography, history etc) then alphabetical within that.
I'm currently climbing the walls because I'm in mid-office-upgrade and I have piles of books in size order all over the place...argh!
Post a Comment