(no subject)

[tisiphone]

So. Tell me about book sorting! My problem: around 800 books across a very, very wide range of subjects, with two subjects (anthropology and science fiction (top level genre)) dominating. How finely grained a sort do you find useful? Are thematic sorts useful? (For example, I have a collection of books to do with London, and another to do with Cambridgeshire.) I tried a simplified Dewey system but Dewey totally breaks down with fiction, and is past the point of usefulness for social sciences.

Comments

[jabber.livejournal.com]

So, this prompts me to ask, how many dictionaries and thesauri are too many? In general, how many reference books on any subject is too many to actually own - but language specifically? The range of words mostly overlaps and the definitions better be pretty darn consistent, right? There's value in getting a well-rounded, comprehensive definitions from more than one source, and full coverage of the breadth of the subject domain is essential, but at what point is there too much redundancy to warrant adding one more book?


As for heterogeneous shelves, do you see much value in adding dividers or spacers between groups? Labels maybe?

[darquis.livejournal.com]

dunno about too many, my preference is for one bilingual, one monolingual and one pocket dictionary for each foreign language. it's somewhat obsolete in the google era and several of my en-pl dictionaries and reference books are older than I, but I'm too sentimental to toss 'em.

for me personally spacers would be pointless - I wouldn't stick to labels [barely care enough to put briefs and socks into their respective drawers], and other types of dividers would eat up valuable real estate. they might be handy for more organized people, though.