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January 18, 2006
From the Heart of Dismay
As of today, I have 1,808 books catalogued on my "Library Thing" catalogue. The dismay sets in when I realize that this covers two sets of shelves in my family room (and it doesn't even complete those). My estimate of my total library may have been low as I am guessing that what is catalogued so far represents about 5% of the total. (But maybe that is misleading because it represents 5% of the shelving space, not all of which is so fully occupied as the shelves in the family room.)
Perhaps I am pessimistic and I'll still come in around 20,000. But the easy part has been done and now it's title by title with much hand entry. Perhaps this catalogue will not be so extensive as otherwise might occur.
Also, I have to go through a proof to make certain that I didn't include Rex Stout titles three and four times. (A common problem given my cataloguing method.)
And given the recent spate of mysteries TSO has been knocked out of first place of similar libraries and now is about third. I'm sure that is a source of enormous heartache to him, so please drop him a note of consolation. :-D
Given what I have left to index, my suspicion is that Miss Woodhouse and Eurydice are likely to increase dramatically in the similarity index pushing poor TSO lower. (But don't tell him, he's very sensitive to these things you know--and I'm certain that he was so devastated by the last revelation that he's left off reading.) The bulk of the remainder are non-Carmelite religious texts and the "classic works"--Dickens, Mrs. Gaskell, Hardy, Fielding, novels of the late 19th and early 20th Century. Then of course there's the unseemly large collection of H. Rider Haggard.
Posted by Steven Riddle at January 18, 2006 1:12 PM
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Comments
Always nice to meet another person with a library the size of mine.
We just got some new shelving, so we have the previously unheard of at our house empty space.
Posted by: cjmr at January 18, 2006 2:33 PM
I don't have half that many books, yet already I feel that they are out of hand. What I really want is to be able to share all my books, so I don't feel guilty, yet still possess them. And be able to buy more, of course.
So I begin to suspect that public libraries were not founded so much from philanthropy, as for librarians and donors to have an excuse for indulging in more bibliomania. :)
Posted by: Maureen at January 18, 2006 10:41 PM
Dear Cjmr,
Thanks for stopping by. I will be checking out your place shortly! (On the web, of course.)
shalom,
Steven
Posted by: Steven Riddle at January 19, 2006 1:27 PM
Steven,
I'm hoing to find a way to have my books in an electronic library/database and if I need to look for a topic, say "limbo" I could find which books have that in the index. Do you know of a way to associate a book's index in Library Thing?
Posted by: Hector at January 19, 2006 11:26 PM