Thursday, August 12, 2010

Packing (The MK & T Library Project)

So, Mary and I are moving again. I've noticed that I believe blogging > packing, but there has been some packing as well. We don't even get to see the actual apartment that we are moving into until Friday (we've seen a similar one, but ours is going to have new cabinets, appliances, lighting fixtures, and possibly lasers. I'm really hoping for the lasers), but Mary and I have already filled 50+ boxes that the good people at Barnes and Noble were kind enough to give us. I say the "good people" because a certain manager got a little snippy with me for being in the back of the store when I am no longer employed there. However, the Barnes and Noble boxes are an absolute necessity because of the huge volume (hereinafter referred to as "MK & T Library Project") of books that we had to box. Putting books in Safeway boxes or something is how Ragnarok begins.

The MK&T Library Project
So, Kate and my library was already organized; split first into fiction and non-fiction. The fiction section was mostly alphabetized by author, although there was a separate section at the beginning for surveys and a section at the end for mythology. The non-fiction was divided by category (and sub-category in the international relations section) and then alphabetized by author. Graphic novels have their own bookcase and organization scheme. That's the sort of organization that makes Mary's brain croon with joy and I'm not particularly adverse to it either.
Unfortunately, it was not sufficient for Mary's neuroses, so as we packed the books into the boxes (without significantly altering their order), Mary cataloged the ISB numbers and numbered the boxes so we know exactly which book is in which boxes. She then uploaded the ISBNs into GoogleBooks (looking up and adding any of the books whose ISB numbers didn't come up). So now our entire library is now enshrined on Kate's GoogleBooks page under "The MK&T Library Project" (Give or take; I have purchased three books since we finished packing books and they have not yet made it into the system).
I know what you're thinking, "surely that was sufficient for Mary's uniquely adorable brand of crazy." Sadly, no. Mary, disappointed with the lack organizational abilities, wrote GoogleBooks a nasty letter (she uses Google products for everything so she assumes any shortcomings are intentional personal affrontery) and signed up for GoodReads, which allows her to organize her library and to import entire spreadsheets, rather than the Notepad documents that she was keeping for GoogleBooks. If you sign up for GoodReads, you can see our library there as well, although I have no entered the books into my account, so once again, you'll have to rely upon Mary for a full list.


I should note that the list on the MK&T Library Project is imprecise - Mary and I have several older editions of books that did not appear in GoogleBooks, including but not limited to, Kate's first edition Willa Cather books. These titles were entered under alternate editions, matching as closely as possible to the publication date as possible. Surprisingly, this imprecision bothers me more than it does Mary. Of course, through this entire entry, I have neglected to mention that I started to make a spreadsheet as many as 5 years ago with the ISBNs of my books (although I never completed it) and technically I may have been the one to propose finally cataloging the entire library as we packed it and Mary just ran with it. . . But, no, Mary is the crazy one.

Updated:
Me: Why can I only see the first ten books of the MK & T Library Project on googlebooks?*
Mary: Because GoogleBooks is weird and I don't like it.

*You can very gradually scroll through the books on Mary's main profile page at the bottom, but if you click the link, you can only see the last ten books or so that we entered.

1 comment:

  1. So...y'all can never ever come to our house. It's for your own safety. The state of our bookshelves would cause at least one of you to have a rage stroke.
    I recently sold/gave away a lot of my books (although you can't tell it by looking at the shelves) because I found myself with a bunch of used, discontinued science fiction books- primarily numbers 2 and 7 in various series of like 20 because my mother can't comprehend my need to read a series in order. She means well and I can't bear to disappoint her by turning down her gifts of books.

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