It all started on Friday. I decided that the bookshelf next to my desk was too cluttered, so I spent the morning (early morning, I might add because Ian woke me up early) cleaning and reorganizing it. Then I thought about the rest of the living room, which is always quite messy because I have far too many hobbies. The fact that our books were in no particular order has been bothering me ever since we moved here, and I decided that since I was cleaning anyway and had a long weekend, I’d just start putting them in order.

First thing to do was get them all off the shelves and put them in an rudimentary order. That meant putting the non-fiction on the futon and the fiction on the floor by the futon. I have a picture of it around here somewhere… But I don’t have the software to upload it here unless I text it from the phone. So maybe later on that picture. Once all the books were off the shelves, the next problem was that we simply do not have enough bookshelves for all the books we have. Hell, there are a lot of books in totes downstairs already because we don’t have enough room on the shelves. Prior to me removing them from the bookshelves, our books were two deep and piled on top of each other. Messy.

Ian came up with the [temporary] solution of getting two more five-shelf bookshelves. After assembling them and rearranging the living room (which meant moving all my craft stuff…no small feat, mind you), we now had 31 shelves (plus three in the bedroom) to put books on. The Dungeons and Dragons books as well as an eight volume set of medieval history books went in the bedroom. In the living room, there are two separate sections of books. On the side closest to the den are two five-shelf and one three-shelf bookshelves. They have all of the fiction, roughly 350 books (after some mild weeding even). That left the futon covered in the non-fiction. Lots of non-fiction. In fact, I’d say the fiction is only about a third (or a quarter) of all our books. The non-fiction was/is going to take a while.

The thing with the non-fiction is that I was them to be in order by subject. While Ian and I were living in Terre Haute, I actually had hopes of putting all of them in order using the Library of Congress Classification, but while that would be helpful in some of the more specialized areas such as languages and linguistics, it would be far too involved for more basic areas such as cooking and crafts. As such, I’ve decided to just use the Dewey Decimal system, which is better for small collections. Besides, I work with the Dewey Decimal all the time at work, so I’m very familiar with it. I’m not writing in the books or affixing labels to them, but I am writing the call numbers down on little pieces of paper and putting them just inside the front cover. I’m also cataloguing the non-fiction as I go, using the Home On-line Library system that Ian programmed for me. HoL is nice because it’s tailored exactly to my specifications, and when anything goes wrong, I just shout into the next room to the “administrator” to fix it. Pretty sweet set-up.

I’ve already catalogued nearly all of our DVDs (our most recent acquisitions aren’t in there nor are all the individual titles in my 50 movie packs), video games, and CDs. I’ll get around to cataloguing the fiction books eventually. Seeing as how easy it is to shelve fiction books, I figured they weren’t as much of a priority for organizing as the non-fiction. I enjoy cataloguing. It’s fun! I’m not getting overly involved in it such as extensive use of decimal points or incredibly specific subcategories, but the non-fiction at my house will be far neater than books at most anyone else’s homes. After all, I know a lot of people who put their books in order by color and size. Idiots.

Once I finish the 200s in the non-fiction, I think I’m going to stop cataloguing for a while and work on cleaning up the rest of the living room to make it more livable. There’s still a ton of craft stuff all over, and there’s a Simon lying around like a slug in that mess somewhere too. I should put him to work crushing cans. At any rate, there’s still a stack of about 15 religion books to catalogue before I’m done with the 200s. One of my major complaints about the Dewey Decimal system is that the religion section is made up of stupid Christian stuff from 220-289, so most of the texts I have on religion will be between 290-299. Biased system. It’s one of the major flaws of the Dewey Decimal system: insanely biased for a W.A.S.P. America. Oh well, I’ll bitch more about that later when I try to catalogue all of my French and German books.