The Shelf Life
of Books: It All Depends on Who's Stacking and Tracking
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED
AT INSIDE.COM (2/15/01)
Laura
Bush ranks her shoes by color, keeps her record
collection impeccably dust-free and swabs her cabinets
with Clorox for kicks. And as we all read in the New
York Times, the nation's First Librarian also shelves
the family volumes by the Dewey decimal system.
While
Washington's power brokers eyed their dottily piled-up
volumes and marveled at the First Lady's obsessive-compulsive
streak, some of us took note that book collections bring
out a bit of the crank in everyone.
Take Rolland
Comstock, the Missouri bibliomaniac who has confessed
to stickering all of his 50,000 books on the spines
-- red for signed editions, blue for unsigned American
editions and green for unsigned English editions. And
then there's good old Samuel Pepys, the 17th-century
diarist who arranged his 3,000 volumes strictly by height,
from smallest to largest -- and in bequeathing the collection
to Cambridge University, stipulated that no book could
ever be added or removed.
Admittedly,
professional bibliophiles aren't often so warped. ''I've
always been in favor of the tried and true alphabetical,''
says Peter Stern, a rare-book dealer in Boston.
''I'm not sure why anyone would do anything else.''
Stern does recall a client who organized his books by
the date of acquisition. ''I thought that was pretty
odd, but not totally insane,'' he explains. ''Organizing
a book collection seems like something that should be
wackier, but it isn't.''
Oh, but
there are some creative systems. ''I'm an extreme book
buyer,'' says Dennis During, a professor of business
who teaches in New York City. Adequate cataloging of
his 10,000 mostly nonfiction titles, he says, requires
nothing short of the Library of Congress classification
system. ''It's guaranteed to find a unique shelf location
for each book,'' During explains, noting that he finds
the system superior to Dewey, which provides a subject
number for every book but requires further alphabetization
by the collector. During puts labels on the back covers
of every volume, having abandoned a more vigorous attempt
to barcode each one upon arrival. The next step? Downloading
it all into a PDA, so that when he's shopping he can
consult a list of titles he has already acquired. ''It'll
keep me from buying duplicates,'' During says.
Wacky
schemes are afoot elsewhere, notably in Kent, Conn.,
where a two-story library is nearing completion to house
what by all accounts is the world's best collection
of first editions in the highly collectible mystery
market. ''It looks like we built a house on the side
of the library, rather than a wing added to the side
of the house,'' says Otto Penzler, who owns the
Mysterious Bookshop and is relishing the moment he can
begin shelving his 50,000 volumes of mystery and crime
fiction. ''It sounds obsessive,'' he says about the
collection, then reconsiders: ''Well, it is obsessive.''
After 12 years of construction (''I kept running out
of money''), the house will have to contend with a library
that keeps growing every day, thanks to the collectibles
constantly passing through his bookshop. ''I have been
accused of opening the store as a front for my own collection,''
says Penzler. ''Not entirely incorrectly, either.''
To organize the loot, Penzler departed from his preferred
method of a single alphabetized collection. Instead,
there will be two alphabets, one for each of the library's
two floors. Favorite books go on the first floor, where
he'll be spending more time; less coveted books go upstairs.
And oh,
how the plot thickens -- with cookbooks. ''The interesting
thing is how politics plays into cookbook shelving,''
says Susan Friedland, executive editor at
HarperCollins, who edits culinary luminaries such
as Marcella Hazan and Alice Waters. Most
of her several thousand cookbooks are sensibly shelved
by cuisine -- French food, Italian food, American food
-- and appliance-related books have their own section.
But here's the politico-culinary twist. ''The Indian
food is near British food because of the Raj,'' Friedland
says. ''The Turks and Greeks and German food are together
because they were on the Axis. It's all quite idiosyncratic,
but it really works for me.''
What works
is, well, what works. To be fair to Laura Bush, it must
be said that Dewey has his defenders, none more ardent
than Joan Mitchell, who is editor in chief of
the Dewey decimal classification at the Library of Congress.
''I suspect quite a few librarians use Dewey at home
because it just makes organizational sense,'' she says.
''If I reflect on my own collection, it's definitely
organized by Dewey.'' Many people are unaware that the
system is constantly updated, so there's a place for
the latest book on animal diversity (333.954), or that
treasured volume on Playpal dolls (688.7221).
Meanwhile,
swanky Dewey partisans are checking in at the Library
Hotel, New York's latest boutique accommodation, which
uses the Dewey system to organize its floors, so that
the tenth floor is given over to General Knowledge,
while the eighth floor is Literature. Each of the 60
rooms has a different topic theme, the ''Erotica'' room
on the Lit floor reportedly being the hotel's most popular.
Still,
Dewey definitely has his detractors. ''I don't know
any collector who uses the Dewey decimal system,'' grumbles
Nicholas Basbanes, author of A Gentle Madness,
the 1995 work on book collecting and bibliomania. ''It
just doesn't make any sense.'' For his part, Basbanes
shares an anecdote about Umberto Eco, whom he
visited while researching his latest book, Patience
and Fortitude (which are the names of the two lions
in front of the New York Public Library; the book is
due out in September from HarperCollins). ''Eco had
to move twice, because the floors were in imminent danger
of collapsing from the weight of his library,'' Basbanes
says. ''Now he's got 30,000 books in the house, and
he designed a warren of shelves so that you could not
fit any more than one book deep on a shelf. He wanted
to be able to see every book.''
You might
say seeing every book was the rationale for the personal
library of meditation guru Osho on the 40-acre campus
of the Osho Meditation Resort in Pune, India. The library's
150,000 volumes ''are sorted according to size and color,''
say the collection's curators, ''and placed on the shelves
in an arrangement that suggests ocean waves. The effect
is organic and natural, with no solid blocks of color
or size to grab the eye and weigh it down.'' Books are
cross-referenced by cover color, number of pages, and
trim size. That way, if Osho wanted to see that ''big
book on Einstein's theory of relativity with the blue
cover,'' the librarian would know just where to go.
''He wanted
it to be aesthetically beautiful,'' says Sarito Neiman,
the Osho organization's New York-based editorial director.
''It was his first priority.'' Neiman adds that occasionally
workers at the library would change the covers of black
books, if there were too many in the collection, so
as to lighten up the mood. Incidentally, Neiman says
that Osho, who died in 1990, remains India's bestselling
author, selling more than a million books and audio
books every year.
In other
words, there are book nuts, and then there are book
nuts. Simon & Schuster editor in chief Michael
Korda probably sums up the vast majority of collectors
with his seat-of-the-pants aesthetic. ''I just pile
my books up,'' he says with a refreshing nonchalance,
''and go on visual memory if I need to find one again.''
©2001 Publishing Trends
