Books I have begged, borrowed, stolen, bought, been given, enjoyed, reviewed, lust after …
I’m slightly obsessed with books. For practical purposes, I prefer to read novels on Kindle, but for everything else, you can’t beat a proper book with a proper cover, pages that crackle or glide through your hands and, above all else, the smell of freshly printed book. Bibliothek is my virtual bookshelf – some I own and some are still on my wish-list; it is the start of my catalogue, having failed miserably to find some decent software for logging all my books. I’ve tried all sorts of different apps, which promise great solutions, but don’t actually work in practice. I did try to follow the Library of Congress classification system and bought a new labelling machine especially for the purpose, but I encountered a few problems:
- It looks as though my book collection was stolen from a library.
- The classification might work for Congress, but it didn’t suit my way of working.
- Aesthetically, it did not lead to pleasing bookshelves.
- A lot of my books are not registered with library systems, so there is no classification number.
So I’m creating my own system here, although I suspect it will be a lifetime’s work to populate it.