Re-organisation

This is a serious contender for the most boring post I have every written, but it has occupied most of the last week, so blogged it must be. I now finally have enough bookcases to house my collection (with some double stacking). So I've been spending the last week or so re-organising my books. The list is below. It actually includes a selection of Anna's fiction, which inflates the total by around 200.


When I first built a record of books, in 2001, I had four main sections: Fiction, Reference, Philosophy and Theology, and History. This worked well for a while, but fell apart as unanticipated collections emerged. The burgeoning travel literature section was put in Reference for lack of anywhere else to go. Politics was roped in with history, but policy documents sat uneasily with the writings Nikephoros Phokas. Religious history I could never decide what to do with and so put in Philosophy and Theology. And I kept moving sport between reference and history, when of course it is neither.


I've now had a back to basics look at the system, added new categories, broken up all the old sections apart from fiction, and have what I hope is a robust, though still provisional, system: 6 sections, 31 categories, and multiple subcategories. It's still a moving feast and I suspect subcategories will expand into full categories over time. But nonetheless, here is an stucture with some non-obvious rules listed out:


Fiction (c.950), sorted by author
Excluded from this are fictional works whose entire purpose now belongs elsewhere, e.g., the Fable of the Bees (only philosophical interest). The boundaries of the categories above are weak and relatively unimportant, but broadly:

• Classic literature: C17-C19
• Classic literature: C20
• Contemporary Literature. As a rule of thumb, classic authors are dead, contemporary authors are not
• Childrens
• Crime
• Fantasy
• Science Fiction
• Humour
• Poetry

History (c.450), sorted by category, country, then date.

• General. Includes theory of history, counterfactuals, and some reference
• The classical hereitage . Includes Byzantium and the early church
• UK and Ireland
• Western and continental history
• Non-western history

Includes church history allocated by country, though much is in the general European sub-category.

Politics (c.70), sorted by category, then subject / author

• Recent political history. Includes memoirs and biographies
• Policy (subdivided by area)
• Economics

Philosophy and Theology (c.200), sorted by category, subcategory, then author

• Philosophy. Including natural philosophy (i.e., science)
• Non-Christian religions
• Christianity. Excludes primarily historical works, but includes all analysis directly pertai ning the bible as well as liturgical, spiritual and contemporary church subcategories

Cultural (c.200), sorted by category, then subject / author

• Books and literary theory
• Art
• Music
• Travel literature. There isn't a satisfactory definition of this, but to my mind includes all first person narratives that are specifically geographic and primarily non-analytical
• Contemporania. Mostly memoirs, but includes biography and of contemporary figures whose significance is primarily cultural, e.g., the diaries of James Lees-Milne
• Sport

Reference (c.75), sorted by category, then subject / author

• Food and Drink
• Language
• Travel Guides
• Reference
• Guides and 'how tos'

I've had most trouble with the political / historical divide which I have relatively arbitrarily put at Suez in the UK, but much later for other countries, about the fall of the Wall. There are obvious contested areas: Cold war IR goes in politics, an accout of the Gulag in History/Western/Russia. Other issues abound in the small miscellaneous books. The New Book of First Names is a reference work I suppose, but so is Kenneth Williams' Complete Acid Drops.

There is some shoehorning, and much of Anna's still to be databased which will push the fiction up by another 200 or so and a few things in history.