Towse: views from the hill

Book shifting. So here’s the problem. The bookcases are, for the most part, filled with the books I intend to stay where they are.

That leaves hundreds of boxes of books to go through on my quest to let go (“Finally!” sez his nibs) of some of the books. You can’t see into boxes without opening them. All the boxes of books on a given subject aren’t necessarily together.

We already have twenty boxes of books or so packed up for the Coast Community Library. The older younger one will come by with his partner maybe the first weekend in August to see if any of the books in the additional nine boxes of SFF titles intended for CCL are ones they want. Let’s call it thirty boxes of books boxed up and ready to shift out. … and more than ten times that many still here, most unsorted.

I have four main areas where books in boxes (and loose now, due to the sorting) are stashed. I have too many boxes whose contents aren’t easily identifiable because I didn’t, back when we were packing the boxes up, always remember to label the boxes (as I do now) so that the contents labels are visible from all sides.

I have other boxes that might be labeled but are hidden by other boxes so I can’t determine the content. In all I have over thirty boxes that are “unknown.” I have another twenty or so that are labeled “nonfic” which need to be sorted through. I have eight that are labeled “misc” which need to be sorted through. I need to get to the “unknown” boxes and see what they might be. And I have the added twist that, due to the vagaries of the move, what is in the boxes is not necessarily as is labeled, if the box is even labeled.

Yesterday I decided that I had to get a grip on what we had, where. I spent some time counting boxes in the four areas and today I created an Excel spreadsheet (and I am so not a believer in spreadsheets) so I can get a handle on which boxes are where and what I can do to shift books around, always remembering that I don’t want to end up with too many books in any one place because even though the space was built with a live load req of 40 lbs/sq foot average, you just don’t want to push it and, like J Carter Brown, I think it was, have your walls started spreading out because of the load of books on the upper floors.

The purpose of this first pass is to get the nonfic and misc and whatever books rough-sorted into categories so that I can then take each category and sort it more definitively and then take those sub-sorts and figure out what stays, what goes.

So … my box count yesterday. After feeding the data into Excel I find I have over seventy “subject” sorts of labels for the boxes, and that’s even with me throwing physics and biology into a greater superset of science when I was making the book count.

Seventy subjects is about fifty too many. I’m having a problem though with sorting some titles. Are they “essay” or “memoir”? When does “memoir” segue into “autobiography”? Would “Letters” be autobiography or memoir or essay? How about if they’re Lord Chesterfield’s Letters to His Son? When do memoirs belong in history?

So I sort and sort and resort. My “reference” boxes had contained all sorts of things. My “facts” boxes had started out as trivia/factoid Uncle John’s and Cecil Adams sorts of books but had wound up also including flags of the world and Amos, Amas, Amat. And around and around and around.

The gross decision is that Area 1 will contain fiction, which still needs sorting. Fiction is all that fiction stuff that isn’t SFF or MYS. Area 2 will contain history & biography & autobiography & memoirs? essays? Area 3 will have SCI-related for now and JUV. Area 4 (the largest area and where I’ve been sorting) will get liberal arts (except history and biography) and all the stuff that needs sorting.

My kludgey spreadsheet tells me how many of what are where so I can wrap my head around how many non-fiction things are in the fiction area (24 boxes! that’s not bad) and how many fiction things are elsewhere (2 … okay).

The sheet also tells me that I have about 400 boxes of books, which (take out the thirty destined for CCL or the older younger one) means (hurray!) over half of the books moved in are either on shelves or headed out the door soon.

When I was making my notes, I didn’t note how many of those 400+ boxes have already been through the primary sort, but there have been loads. Heck, I probably missed some boxes anyway, but close enough is close enough.

A light’s glimmering at the end of the tunnel.

One thing, no, two things, I found day before yesterday were two identical copies of Kipfer’s THE ORDER OF THINGS, an interesting book but don’t ask me why I have two copies. The table of contents may help me with some of the “How do I sort out the science-related books into subcategories that will make it easy for me to see what I have?” sorts of decisions.

Does Feynman go in “essays” or in “physics” or in just what?

How do I make sure when I’m sorting through for dups that I have all the Feynmans in one place?

Odd, isn’t it, that I haven’t been buying many books at used bookstores or thrift shops lately?

I’m tired.

There are boxloads of books to go through.

Still.

So, what’s taking so long, Sal?

Let’s recap.

We moved ~ 800 boxes of books up here. I have no clue how many are left to sort through. We moved a bunch of shelves as well, but most of those shelves are full so the sorting is taking a long while, while I move boxes from this end of the space to that.

The cookbooks are out of boxes (for the most part) and against the wall in the eastmost room. The travel books (pure travel and travelogue) are in two banks of bookcases perpendicular to the cookbook bank.

The SFF books take up three banks of book shelves to the west of the two banks of travel books (and, yes, perpendicular to the cookbook bank).

There are no more shelves in this room, which is the room where I’ve been sorting books out of boxes and into other boxes since last week or so when I finished sorting the SFF books. (The SFF books wound up with four boxes of books with no space on the shelves and another five boxes of SFF short stories that didn’t fit on the shelves.)

The hall between the eastmost room and the westmost room has stacks of book boxes, mostly boxes marked HIST or PHYSICS or SCI plus boxes with several Harvard Classics sets. Oh, and my SUNSET Magazine going back to forever, and a box of Christmas craft/recipe magazines and books, and …

I have all the crime fiction (six+ bookcases) on shelves in the westmost room along with a couple shelves of writing books. That room also has a bunch of art (pictures, posters, paintings) and music (78s, LPs, tape, CDs and the occasional 45RPM) that need sorting through eventually (not now) and another twenty-five boxes or so of a motley collection of books, which will be sorted in the current go through.

The alcove outside the westmost room has the SUNSET magazines mentioned up there plus a bookcase full of assorted Tightwad Gazettes and how-to-make-it and FIX YOUR PLUMBING sorts of books that need sorting. Oh, and there’s probably 25 boxes labeled HIST and S/W DEV and TECH and what-not.

The hall leading out from the alcove outside the westmost room to the door on that level has a few bookshelves that I may use for sorting the books in that area. Mostly the area has boxes of adult fiction books and (currently) seventeen+ boxes of books destined for the library and nine boxes of SFF books waiting for the older younger one to poke through plus some NF and some MISCNF and … oh, it goes on and on.

My pal came through today to pick up some cookbooks I’d offered. She took a few. Offered me some of hers that she was getting rid of.

The books she didn’t take were reboxed for the library.

I found a box or two of duplicates and things I didn’t want/need today. I brought home a list of titles to check in alibris.com and abebooks.com to make sure I don’t accidentally give away a first edition of Sue Grafton’s KEZIAH DANE.

What did I find? Well, here are some examples.

I found TWO sets of the 2vol. THE PIMA BAJO OF CENTRAL SONORA, MEXICO. by Pennington. 1980. Univ of Utah

I found a selection of slim pamphlets with dust covers by David Starr Jordan and printed roundabouts 1912 by Whitaker & Ray-Wiggin in San Francisco. Titles:
KNOWING REAL MEN
THE PRACTICAL EDUCATION
THE SCHOLAR IN THE COMMUNITY

Google /”David Starr Jordan”/ if you don’t know who he is.

I found a slim, HB, blue jacket with gilt SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN REFERENCE BOOK. 1891. Munn & Co, Office of the Scientific American.

I found MASTERING MAGIC CARDS by George H. Baxter and Larry W. Smith. Wordware Publ. 1995.

And I found everything in between and to both sides.

My method is thus: rather than go through just once and decide toss/save, I’m going through once, sorting out the dups and things I know I really have no need of and repacking the boxes, relabeling, if necessary. (Thanks be for masking tape. Rip off the old, on with the new.)

I relabel boxes which had been NF or MISC or VERY MISC as FIC REF FACT phil/psych/soc HIST SCI or whatever and sort the books into them with a gross sort of sort.

The next pass will be another pass for duplicates and “do I want to keep this?” and an opportunity to sort the general (SCI, f’rex) boxes into a finer sort so that I can wrap my head around what I have instead of just thinking, I think I saw that title or one like that about five boxes ago. I’ll have a chance to pull everything out of the FUN & GAMES boxes, f’rex, and see just how many copies of 150 WAYS TO PLAY SOLITAIRE I have. (I found three today.)

Then there’ll be a third level sort … then …

Come 2009, I may have things under control.

Update: The library all the boxes of books are intended for is the Coast Community Library in Point Arena, which serves the northern Mendocino coast communities.

An old friend is heavily involved with book hugger issues up there and showed us around the library when we were up visiting him in Gualala last May. What a neat library. Great community support. What a story that library and its Friends group have.

When the library was moving from their dinky digs into the old Mercantile building (which the Friends raised money to buy and restore), over a hundred locals lined up along Highway One through town for a “book worm” bucket brigade and moved the books across Highway One and down the road a piece to the new digs, hand to hand until the books were all moved and settled on their shelves in the restored building.

How many places have that kind of community support for the library?

We told Don that he can come down here to get books and if they all don’t fit in his van (and they won’t, it’s now apparent), we’ll take books up and the library can take what they want of the books and sell the rest to make money for the library. That offer to Don last May is what precipitated all this sorting activity. That and the fact that books in boxes do you no good when you’re looking for your copy of Watts’ THE WAY OF ZEN and all you know is that it’s here somewhere in one of these boxes …