Well, the moving truck finally brought our stuff to us in Virginia, and that meant it was time to organize and shelve all of our books. How to do it? By subject? By author? By color? By sum of all ISBN digits? By how loud the book is when dropped from 4.5 feet? Well being the giant academic nerd that I am, I suggested “why not just use the Library of Congress?” We did.
Now really, even though my family has a lot of books, we don’t have nearly enough to call what we have “a library,” and so the Libraray of Congress system isn’t exactly a perfect fit, but it made the decision for us, and it was both a little fun, and turned up a couple of surprises along the way. Here are a couple that stood out while we were sorting and shelving:
Anthony Bourdain, the opinionated trash-talking chef and travel guide of No Reservations (among other shows) has written a number of books about his career and experiences as a chef and world traveler. Where does the LoC put his books? Why TX – Home Economics of course!
The Physics of Christmas by Roger Highfield gets put into GT - Manners and Customs, as the subject has been determined to be 1. Christmas and then 2. Science. Also in the G section (subsection GF - Human ecology. Anthropogeography) are the The Worst Case Scenario Survival Handbook line of books. Except, oddly enough, The Worst Case Scenario Survival Handbook: Work Which ends up in PN - Literature (General).
Historical creative non-fiction also end up in weird places. The creative non-fiction The Perfect Storm by Sebastian Junger gets sorted into QC – Physics, and Seabiscuit: An American Legend by Laura Hillenbrand goes into SF - Animal husbandry, Animal science.
Now I’m not a librarian, nor do I have any training in library science. I’m not knocking the classification system here at all – in fact I may have even been poorly informed by the various search engines I used to look up the LoC classifications for my books that didn’t have them printed on the copyright page. I’m just an astronomer with a couple bookcases of books who is rather amused by where this classification scheme puts some of them. With that disclaimed I’ll sign off with one last placement oddity: The Pursuit of Happyness by Chris Gardner (now a movie starring Will Smith) gets filled under HG – Finance.
