Articles in “Internet”

I’ve mentioned before how much I enjoy the Google searches that bring people to The Circulating Library. So here’s another selection of Google searches from the past few weeks.

People have been busily searching for Nancy Drew, it seems, because I’ve had hits from the following searches:

• “Nancy Drew pants.” I love this one. Are these like Daisy Dukes, d’you think? Because I seem to remember Nancy favouring skirts.

• “Nancy Drew: Who is the champion of cheaters now?” I don’t know! Though there was that one time the young Nancy investigated the case of someone wiping her name off the list of volunteers for an ice-skating competition. I think there was some cheating involved in that.

• “Nancy Drew using a torch.” I have no idea whether the impulse behind this is a little kinky or not, but I should try and find a picture of Nancy using a torch, just in case the search is repeated.

This one is only peripherally related to Nancy Drew:

• “Detective girls in bondage.” I said to Nick, “How do you suppose, if they’re in bondage, you can tell they’re detective girls? D’you think they’d still be holding their magnifying glasses?” Still, it’s all in line with the most popular search that brings people to my site, which is still “Agatha Heterodyne porn.”

There’s also been a small flurry of Barbie searches, including the following:

• “Servant Barbies.” Sadly, for all her unrealistic body image, I think Barbie’s careers were always more high-flying than this, weren’t they?

• “Barbie and Ken in bedroom.” And the dolls aren’t even anatomically correct . . .

And some slightly more random searches:

• “Three pairs of tweezers.” Gasp! The geckoes’ invasion plans continue apace! Quick, anonymous Googler: hide your cheese slicer!

• “The dangers of coffee.” I suspect they were thinking more of heart palpitations and less of that time I spilt it on myself and then blogged about it.

• “The song that the boy is trying to run away and he has to marry the goblin princess.” I’m sorry that I’ve never heard of this song, because it sounds fabulous.

• “Fictional characters with heart disease.” So specific! I always wonder about the impulse behind these types of searches, but I dare say it’s just rampant curiosity. Wikipedia should have a list of these fictional characters.

• “Leavisite English department.” I wonder: running towards or running away from?

• “Cow + gate.” I mainly included this one because I cannot for the life of me remember using those two words in conjunction on this blog.

But this one is my current favourite:

• “Brust milk.” I said to Nick, “A fellow Kiwi? Or do you think Steven Brust has started a side business?”

I’ve mentioned before my struggles with Delicious Library 2, and my belief that, while it’s a wonderful invention, adding my back catalogue to it might actually kill me.

(Okay, I may not have phrased it quite that way, but I was thinking it.)

So this brings me to the new link I’ve added to my blogroll over there to your right: a slightly inaccurate link, since it’s not a blog, at all. It’s my library, which I’ve uploaded to space on the Internet.

Partly, I’m looking for a way to catalogue my books offline (though, having cleverly downloaded the app. before Amazon removed the rights to their catalogue for mobile apps, for reasons best known only to themselves, I do also have a copy of the catalogue on my iPhone).

Partly, though, it’s because this is, after all, the Circulating Library. I talk about my books here. I even fetishise my books here (and, honestly, everywhere else).

And linking to this catalogue means you can take a wander along my shelves, if you so wish.

The application does set the books out on shelves, so it feels as much like browsing a library as you can get on the Internet.

The application generates a primary shelf, which includes (in alphabetical order by author) every book you enter, and then allows you to create sub-shelves by author, genre, or any other category that helps you make sense of the chaos. When you’re dealing with a large number of books, the sub-shelves help keep the system saner than it often is in real life: they contain everything that’s on the primary shelf, but in small, easily digestible packets.

I chose only to publish my sub-shelves. I store some items on multiple shelves, so, for example, vampire boarding-school stories turn up under “Children’s Fantasy and Science Fiction” and “Girls’ School Stories,” just so I can always be sure of finding them. And some categories are under-represented, so far—like “Art”—because I haven’t made my way around to the bookcase on which they’re stored yet.

These 1800 books are not a complete record of all the books I own: it’s a library catalogue in progress.

Feel free to browse.