NP - How do you sort your books?

[Phillip Greenlief]

ouch! this brings up such painful feelings. 

so, i was divorced seven years ago and i realized i was going to have to 
downsize when i moved. i was living in a spacious house with plenty of room for 
books and i was moving into a smaller one-bedroom apartment and had to sell 14 
boxes of books in order to make it work. that's right, unload 14 boxes of books. 
ug. i called black oak books and invited them to come over and bid on the books 
- with very few exceptions, i just let them buy whatever they wanted and i just 
let a lot of titles (that i was terribly fond of) go ... in some cases, a year 
after the move, i was still saying things like, "what the fuck??? - i let those 
bastards have my copy of joyce's handwritten manuscript of ULYSSES???"

my current system strives to adapt to the space where i live - a one-bedroom 
apartment with an extra room (besides the living room) that i use for my music 
studio. i live in an old -faux-craftsman building that has some nice built-in 
bookshelves in both the studio room and the main living room. i think i squeeze 
about 250 books into each of those (4) built-in shelves, and all the fiction 
titles are kept in the music room by alpha. in the main living room, there are 
the remaining fiction titles (my alpha system is different than bekah's ... 
fiction starts with A in the music room and moves from left to right into the 
living room) - the living room starts with P (proust, and yes, pynchon) and ends 
with virginia woolf. the bottom two shelves in that unit house a host of 
cultural studies/history titles. the other large shelving unit holds all the dvd 
titles - around 400 at last count.

in the music room, there is also a tall bookshelf with nothing but music texts 
... each shelf has a different focus (composer bios - theory and harmony texts - 
pocket-scores - "stuff i'm working on"). 

in a large, walk-in closet there are two large filing cabinets - one is filled 
with my compositions, one is filled with a variety of orchestral and chamber 
music scores. since i run an independent record label, there are several 
thousand CDs perched on the shelves in the closet, along with the majority of my 
vinyl LPs.

back in the music studio, on top of the upright piano are 5 stacks of piano 
music - in no particular order. between the two large built-in bookshelves is a 
kind of built-in credenza where the tall art books can live without fear of 
hitting their heads on overhanging shelves. 

in the bedroom there is a large bookshelf unit that houses poetry and philosophy 
and plays. top two shelves are poetry the bottom two shelves are philosophy - 
these are not stored in alpha orderliness.

beyond the kitchen, there is a little breakfast nook, and directly across from 
it is a bookshelf with more art books and children's books (can't help it - 
still have all this stuff from childhood - including mad magazine paperbacks, 
etc.)

that's about it. of course, there are books stacked on most of the available 
surfaces - end-tables, night-stands, desktops, breakfast nook, etc. 
 





________________________________
From: John Bailey <sundayjb at gmail.com>
To: Kai Frederik Lorentzen <lorentzen at hotmail.de>
Cc: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Sun, August 12, 2012 4:45:09 AM
Subject: Re: NP - How do you sort your books?

Walter Benjamin's thoughts on unpacking his book crates during a move
might be relevant here.

http://townsendlab.berkeley.edu/sites/all/files/Benjamin%20Unpacking%20My%20Library.pdf


"Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion
borders on the chaos of memories."

On Sun, Aug 12, 2012 at 9:01 PM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen
<lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:
>
> Colors are very important to me. That's why it always takes so long to
> reorganize. Actually you have to live surrounded by your books to recognize
> the fitting patterns.
>
> On 12.08.2012 11:19, Kai Frederik Lorentzen wrote:
>
>
> Alphabetically? Hardly! I create nests along genre, color, nationality etc.
> To prevent this from becoming too sterile I place a good deal of book
> completely illogical and add some more or less meaningful installations
> like, for instance, putting Ratzinger's book on Christian mysticism
> ("Schauen auf den Durchbohrten") in between an introduction to Voodoo and a
> photography book by Nobuyoshi Araki. One effect of this practice is that I
> fear removals (it always takes half a year to reorganize the library).
> Another one that my wife seldom finds a book without asking me. But that's
> OK: I need my personally designed library order to feel - at least a little
> bit - at home in this world.
>
> On 12.08.2012 10:21, Kris Williams wrote:
>
> I start with genre, then alphabetically, then they get re-read, then I cross
> reference, after that I spill wine on some pages...next thing you know,
> Hemingway is sleeping with Platt, and Poe watches through a window.  Then I
> start over with genre...sigh...
>
> On Aug 12, 2012 12:34 AM, "Prashant Kumar" <siva.prashant.kumar at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> I've had to reorganise my collection recently and was idly wondering how
>> plisters do it (if at all), and why?
>>
>> P.
>
>
>
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