I'm About To Do Something Potentially Dull
Posted 3 July 2008 in Books by Catriona
And that’s sequentially upload images of my bookshelves on to the blog.
I do actually have some quite good reasons for doing this. Some are just solipsistic (example: I just like looking at books. Preferably other people’s books, but my own will do if there are no others available) and some are practical (I don’t have a decent catalogue of the books, which worries me slightly).
But the main impulse is practical. I love my books, and I’m radically running out of space. People do tell me that I should stop buying them (or worse: my mother once suggested that I throw a book away for every new book I buy) but the short answer is that I can’t.
I do restrict myself to the best of my ability, but it’s more than flesh and blood can stand to walk past a bookshop without looking in. And once you look in, you inevitably find something you want. And . . . well, the end result is you start posting pictures of your bookshelves onto the Internet just so you can be sure what you actually own.
So this might be dull. Might be exciting. Who knows?
But it’s rather a big task, and I’m not going to devote every entry to it for the next two weeks. That would be dull, no question.
Share your thoughts [5]
1
Tim wrote at Jul 3, 12:35 pm
Don’t you have access to some form of virtual bookshelf?
2
Catriona wrote at Jul 3, 09:39 pm
Well, yes—Delicious Library. But it takes forever to enter all the books, because Delicious Library works from barcodes, and a lot of mine don’t have barcodes, so you have to either default to an ISBN—if they have one of those—or enter all the details manually.
I may be something of a bibliographer at heart, but I don’t have the time or the inclination right now to manually catalogue the results of eight years’ unrestrained book shopping.
And, frankly, this is more fun.
For me.
3
Catriona wrote at Jul 3, 10:41 pm
Anyway, the first post turned out to be rather funny, I thought. I enjoyed it, but then I’m not an unbiased source.
4
Nick Caldwell wrote at Jul 7, 07:53 am
Let’s get that Bluetooth barcode scanner that works with Delicious Library! Not that it’d help with the books that are sans barcodes. It would just be neat.
5
Catriona wrote at Jul 7, 08:01 am
Yes, by all means lets buy more gadgets. I realise that that might actually be better than the current process of holding books up to the iMac camera and hoping it can scan the barcodes, but do you really think we’d make any use out of a Bluetooth scanner?
Do you not remember how long it took it to enter the 500-odd books I moved off those two shelves in the study? Actually, it may not even have been more than 300-odd, and it took us an entire weekend. There’re double that number of books in the hallway alone, remember.