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.”
