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Today I went through the outlying bookshelves – the ones in the bedroom and bathrooms – and purged them. Then I did some final rearrangements of the books and shelved the new books. I now have the equivalent of about two and half shelves of open space and shelves that were packed 2 deep are now single packed for the most part, allowing for some grouping issues (I have all the Agatha Christies piled on top of one another on one shelf for instance and all the books relating to Tudor England are crammed into another shelf as well).  I’m now going through the LibraryThing booklist & matching up books. I now see I should shelve things in an alphabetical rather than an aesthetically pleasing manner. It makes tracking them easier These are the final purge totals. (I found a stash of books from the last purge on the bottom shelf of a bookcase blocked by my sewing machine cart) History 59 Esoteric 38 Fantasy 6...

The romance books are on the shelves in the far corner from the door, behind the pile of random boxes and collapsible chairs. They are the last group bunched together on the shelves and the second to last group I have to purge. After this is just general fiction and general fiction is scattered all over the place. Romance is a denial category for me. For some reason I always think I have fewer romance novels than I do. I had every intention of claiming this subject had suffered heavily in the previous purge, along with fantasy & science fiction. But the numbers just don’t bear that out. There are 197 books tagged with ‘romance’ in my Library Thing library. 189 are on the booklist. I stopped keeping up the booklist in 2005, so I have only read 8 new romance novels in about 4 years. That probably accounts for why I think I have so few. Romance novels are just a drop in the book bucket. I counted the romance books on my shelves. There are 153. minus the 8 new ones….145 subtrac...

My largest genre by far.  There are 592 books tagged ‘mystery’ in my Library Thing library. The next closest number is ‘history’ with 246. According to my booklist, I had 398 mystery books in my house prior to my last purge. I got rid of about half of them, but because it is my favorite genre I’ve probably added about a third of that number back. Giving me roughly 260 mystery novels currently. I read historic mysteries, my favorite settings being until recently, the medieval/Tudor era and the early Roman Empire. Lately the 1920’s have been growing on me, with 12 of the 15 books I recently purchased being set in that era (the Daisy Dalrymple series and the Phryne Fisher series). I approached these shelves with some dread because the vast majority of these books are old friends. All the Agatha Christies, gathered from used bookstores around Morgantown while I was in college. I remember packing them up every May (more of them every year) and carting them to yet another apartment, ...

Sitting cozily next to the 2 shelves of fantasy (and overflowing on to them) are the science fiction books (not including the works of Douglas Adams, which are in a special category all their own – Holy and UnPurgeable). The scifi books were the victims of the hard core purge a few years ago. There were 183 then and only about 60 some books remain. I have 159 books tagged with sci fi in Library Thing, which makes me wonder what 20 or so books I have mis-tagged, either in the booklist or Library Thing. Possibly the Thomas Covenant series,… pause while I consider matching up 183 books in Library Thing…no, not today. I haven’t picked up one of these books since that purge. But I can’t quite let go of them. They are the products of my happy, prosperous, child free days in the late 90’s, when I was making lots of money in the phone business and chatting on Doctor Who email lists. I can’t give these books up! I know some of the authors! well…’know them’ in the way you ‘know’ people w...

I’ve mentioned the booklist a few times but I have never really explained it. The booklist, in it’s current incarnation is an Excel spreadsheet that lists every book I owned over a roughly 20 year period. It start in 1985 as a list in a notebook of all the books in my possession, after I bought some duplicates at a used bookstore because the cover art was different. It was handwritten, eventually rewritten into a loose leaf binder alphabetically. I entered it all into whatever the DOS based spreadsheet program was on the 286 DH bought in 1991 and it eventually evolved into an Excel spreadsheet with categories and subcategories and could be sorted by author or date or topic etc. It even spent a brief period as an Access database, but not successfully, so it went back to Excel. It was handy to have a spreadsheet to use when I was learning to do different things in Excel so it ended up with a lot of information I didn’t exactly need or originally intend to track. I can tell you how many...

I decided to start with my smallest fiction subject. I used to be a huge fantasy fan. If dragons and/or wizards were in a book, I bought it. I had dozens and dozens of fantasy books, almost 200 according to the booklist, actually. 219 books are tagged ‘fantasy’ in my Library Thing library, which includes library books. It is my 3rd most used tag. But gradually my interests shifted more toward historic fiction and mystery. Plus with so many people writing stories in settings like Krynn, the quality got uneven and Raymond Feist became so prolific I couldn’t keep up.  When the time came to purge a few years ago, most of the fantasy books were shipped out.  I kept my favorites. The original Dragonlance saga books, the Rose of the Prophet series, the first 4 of the Riftwar series and everything by David Eddings. There really aren’t that many books. If the Eddings books were not almost all hardbacks they would only fill one shelf. hhmmm…the Eddings books… stares at book t...

I am still working on the non fiction part of my bookcases. I have moved on to the esoteric case – books on spirituality, the goddess, Wicca, druids, philosophy, tarot, Arthuriana and child rearing. Some of my goddess spirituality books Some of my tarot books Does a woman who had not really read the cards in 7 years actually *need* 36 books about tarot? That’s not counting the books that come with the decks. I have 77 tarot decks (I was a collector in my child free days), at least 30 came with substantial sized books. Do I really need 77 tarot decks? No. No I don’t, but that is a purge for another day.  I also don’t need quite so many goddess books. I’ve been walking this path for almost 16 years now. I am beyond the ‘gather every book you can find on the broadly defined topic’ stage and my interest has drifted from the Celtic focus. Working with ruthless determination & speed I kept maybe 10 of those books and about that many tarot ones. I wish I could show you...

I decided to start with the non-fiction books reasoning that: A. I am more of a fiction fan so they might be marginally easier for me to purge in a calm & rational manner B. They are what is the first two bookcases of the office and are more likely to be grouped together in other bookshelves. Mostly B was the driving force because I am attached to all these books & can rationalize keeping every last one of them. I approached the first bookshelf and tried to be detached about it’s contents – history. Oh but I *love* history. Especially Tudor era history which is the bulk of the books, and the history of women from ancient to Tudor times, which is most of the rest of the books, and London, which is the rest of the rest of the books. So I can’t get rid of ANY of them. ….stares at the shelves for a bit, fingering the titles fondly… Ok, maybe I do not need 5 autobiographies of Elizabeth I, maybe just my 2 favorites and I never really liked Mary, Queen of Scots so we ca...

I ordered 11 books off of half.com last week. I got them for a total of about $60 including shipping. That is probably the most I have spent in a single time on books in over a year. It is certainly the most books I have purchased at once in well over two years. They are either books I have heard on audio & want to read again or books I have checked out of the library often enough I decided to just buy them. So they have started arriving the past few days and I went to put a few of them on my bookshelves. This proved more of a challenge that I expected. A couple or so years ago I got rid of ALOT of books. HUNDREDS of books actually. Boxes and boxes of books went out of this house. About a hundred or so were listed on half.com or bookmooch.com.  So many books left my house that, despite the evidence of my own eyes, I firmly believed I had gotten rid of most of my books and all I needed to do was reorganize what was left & there would be all this space on my bookshelves. ...