06 Why at all arrange our books subject-wise?

An interesting question is: why at all bother with a physical sorting of our books by subject heads? After all, any database program would have a search facility that could easily locate the books with selected keywords. Then all we would have to do is to add our new books at the end of the pile, or shelf, with a running serial number (the ‘acquisition’ number in library-speak), and as long as the books were kept in their serial order, we could locate the selected book physically.

Well, this is more or less the system people use to maintain reprints and papers in academic collections. The effort of sorting and grouping them subject-wise becomes unproductive, because they are usually read only once. They are also so thin that they can easily get lost sight of in between all the other papers. So what is done is to give them a running serial number, type in the title and author in a database program, enter a bunch of keywords (from the Dewey listing, if needed), and forget the whole question of shelf mark and classification. Then, when you want to retrieve papers on a particular subject, just enter the keywords in your database’s search facility, and you will get the serial numbers of the relevant papers (holdings, assets). You can keep them in boxes, as anyway they won’t stand up in shelves...

There are no doubt large collections which do use this run-of-the-mill approach for scholarly books, text books and so on which may be accessed only occasionally. But for the books in your personal library, half (or much more!) of the joy of possessing them lies in your physical interaction with them. You want to touch them, admire their serried rows from a distance, riffle their pages, read a chapter or two, and sometimes even dip your nose in them. If you are a bird watcher, you want a row of books on the birds of each major geographical zone, or of major orders or families. If you are a philosophy enthusiast, you want a row of books covering each school of thought; and if you are into history, obviously you want a series covering each continent and period. If you love food, you want to browse different cuisines all at once.

You are a collector, and collectors like to view things in sets. You may lose your sleep if one volume is missing in a series, and that’s why these stray volumes of a set command high prices. For such collections, then, there’s nothing to match the elegance and sheer feeling of wholeness that a structured classification system provides.