Let’s first get over some elementary, basic approaches to classifying and cataloguing your books. I have a certain brilliant friend, a genuine manager bureaucrat, who once was in charge of a premiere research institution, who wanted to know why they didn’t just ‘colour-code’ the books in the library and be done with it. He may have been kinaesthetic, or panaesthetic, or any of a number of novel, unusual ways of dealing with sensory stimuli. But for large collections, we will usually have to go for fairly structured approaches that depend on the most convenient pattern of arrangement for us in our workaday lives.
For a small personal collection, often nothing more elaborate may be called for than a simple Fiction/Non-fiction divide. The Fiction is the easier portion, as most people don’t really want to divide it up into sub-categories, unless it’s by nation and language (English, English-American, French, Russian, German and so forth). Since the Indo-Soviet culture centres used to distribute amazingly economical volumes (cheap is not a nice word to use for them), I happen to have a middling collection of old Russians like Pushkin and Chekhov. If you have a large collection of, say, English literature, maybe you would like to group them by what is known as ‘genre’, like prose, drama, poetry, criticism, essays, and so on. Or, you could group them by periods… Ancient, Classical, Romantic, Nationalistic, modern, post-modern, and so on (I don’t know much about this, perhaps you would have specific classes in each nationality’s literature, depending on the watershed events in their history and evolution). Within such a category or sub-category, you would group them by author’s name, like Shakespeare, Wordsworth and so on (usually in the order of the surnames or family names, not by the first names, although we will come back to this in a later post). You would have one set for classical works (Literature or belles-lettres as it’s termed), and another separate series for modern fiction (popular stuff, pulp, romances, and so on). The dividing line is a bit vague…where would you put Agatha Christie, for instance. Maybe you could just do post-World War II and pre-WWII and be done with it.
This is more or less the scheme in the Dewey system, too. The same could be extended to all Non-fiction as a whole, if you have very few in this category. Personally, I feel that sooner or later this will become too limiting, so I would much prefer to start dividing them up by at least some major subject categories right from the beginning…at the minimum, say Humanities and Sciences. Within each, of course, you would arrange the books in alphabetical order of the author names.
There are some other plausible criteria for dividing your collection. For instance, big hard-bound picture books and encyclopaedias could go into a shelf of their own, within which they would of course be arranged in the order of the author names. In libraries, this may be called the ‘Folio’ section referring to the big size, which anyway calls for special shelving, or maybe the ‘Reference’ section to denote their high value, so this is not as daft as it may sound.
Another scheme would be to separate His, Hers, and the Kids’ books. That will avoid recriminations. In fact, I would strongly urge each person to only fiddle around with their own collections, and not touch their spouses’ or their kids’ books and records…you have been warned.
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