Book nerd

I own a lot of books. My spreadsheet shows over 1100 books in my scholarly collection, and I suspect there are a few that have escaped the spreadsheet.

I don’t keep track of the fiction, as there’s a certain amount of flux in that collection. Some favorites have been with me for most of my life, while other books come in, get read, and then given away again.

Because I have so many books, I keep the scholarly collection ordered by Library of Congress call numbers. Roughly. Due to various moves, sometimes they’re only sorted by letter(s) and then maybe by period: DA is English history, and I can usually tell by the title whether they’re 13th, 14th, or 15th century. I have ambitions to get them all properly organized, so in my spreadsheet I try to give each its proper call number.

This is easy for books published in the US, which generally print an LC number on the publication page. It’s still easy for UK and European books that are owned by major US libraries that use the LC system, or which belong to some UK libraries that have adopted the LC system for convenience (IIRC, the Oxford History Faculty does this).

Then there are the truly obscure books, published by minor presses in the UK, owned only by repository UK libraries and various German libraries, none of which use LC numbers. This is where I get into the Library of Congress site and start downloading PDFs explaining their system, so that I can assign an appropriate number in my spreadsheet.

Why do I do this? (A) I need some sort of system, and (B) most of the libraries I use are on LC, so (C) it’s convenient to be able to look for books among their usual friends, no matter where I am.

I actually love getting into the LC’s PDFs and figuring out how to catalog my weird books. It’s so cool that the LC provides information about their system to anybody who wants it. I may have only one book in the CB category, but I know that is its proper area.

Curses, late again

However, since the Six on Saturday meme keeps me showing up at least once a week (usually), I’ll go ahead and post the pictures I took yesterday (I got that far), and then they’ll be here for reference purposes. Maybe next week I can get back to the proper schedule.

1, the peonies are about ready to pop:

2, the irises are eyeing their moment:

3, the bleeding hearts are more profuse:

4, this flash of blue caught my eye in the grass; I guess we have baby robins somewhere:

5, more of the shade garden:

6, the vegetable plot, and more things I need to plant, mostly in it (but one is a pincushion flower, and I’m thinking about where it should go; and another is a spearmint that I bought by mistake, when I was reaching for oregano, and I don’t want it; anyone want a spearmint seedling?):

The people who showed up on time were over at the Propagator’s place.

Six on . . . Sunday starts with S

I was all set to post this yesterday, and then got distracted by a lovely e-mail from Lady Maud. The magnolia is over, the bulb flowers nearly gone, and the peonies are up but still not revealing their colo(u)r. So here’s what I have:

1, in the shade garden I have bleeding hearts (and a dandelion that I should dig out):

2, there are also forget-me-nots and a flower whose name I know intermittently but can’t think of at the moment, maybe starts with a B? The flowers are pink.

3, the lilac is a standard-issue lavender, not blooming so profusely as I would hope:

4, moving around the side of the house, the Japanese maple glows in burgundy (and the grass badly needs cutting):

5, two views of clematis, the fall bloomer that grows up the grapevine that shades the deck, and the summer bloomer with tiny flowers, round the corner:

6, the last daffodil, surrounded by hostas and day lilies (and more dandelions):

Six on Saturday is hosted by The Propagator. His post will be up all week, so you can go see the links of people who were on time!