(no subject)

[melannen]

I just wrote what was supposed to be a couple of paragraphs of reaction to siderea's post about Marie Kondo and books, which turned into multiple pages of feelsdump about tidying and really the only parts that need to see the light of day are

Derry Girls is fine, I guess, but if you've watched one of the Sister Michael compilation vids you're probably good stopping there

and

(A story about a large donations-sorting center that has some kind of magical heatsink/storage battery for all the bad vibes from the spirits of trashed once-beloved objects is something I would like to read, please. Anyone who thinks Westerners don’t understand animism of made objects has never helped sort junk donations on a large scale and seen what people couldn’t bear to throw away. We’re just deeply uncomfortable with it because most of us don’t have a good framework to understand it in. Can we call the story "The Joy Equations"? Can we power an FTL drive with the accumulated spiritual sadness of the debris of the Age of Excess?)

Anyway, what it was meant to be an intro to: I have finally finished all of the small tasks I could pretend were "preparation" and have to face the next piece of my ongoing tidying project: fit ~400 unshelved nonfiction books onto ~6 available feet of linear shelf space.

Okay yes that seems comically impossible on the face of it, but I think I can squeeze a fair amount of more space by accepting that all the rest of the nonfiction will just have to be shelve for maximum space use instead of attractiveness of shelves, and also weed about 10%-15% of the collection as I go.

It's the weeding that's going to be hard. Most of these books have already survived multiple weeds, and I don't buy any new ones unless:

1. they make me happy.
2. I could not easily get another copy if I needed one on short notice* (i.e., they aren't the sort of thing that's on every library shelf and in every used bookstore in fifteen copies, they aren't constantly in print, and if they're public domain they either don't have a digital copy available free yet or there's a reason I want a physical copy instead.)
3. they fit into a certain short list of topics of special interest that I am likely to find useful at some point.

*being able to get them on Amazon doesn't count because Amazon is evil and also I don't let myself bookshop on Amazon because I have enough of a problem already. Being able to get them in non-free-to-share ebook doesn't count because just because they're accessible in ebook now doesn't mean they will be later, and just because I have them saved as files now doesn't mean I'll be able to access the files later: learned that one hard and early.

This list is fairly static over time and fairly well refined at this point, and most of the books I buy these days fit into more than one category on it (at 3+ it's pretty much a lock to buy.) But I realized it also only existed in my head and it might be a useful exercise to write it out.

Not comprehensive, but hopefully close. And a lot of the categories are more refined than the best wording I've come up with so far, but these are pretty close.

1. adult coloring books that are either x-rated adult or have informational content
2. african-american culture, race
3. ancient history
4. anthropology of aesthetics and epistemology
5. artificial intelligence
6. asexuality and singlehood
7. backpacking and hiking
8. biblical exegesis & apocrypha
9. bibliophibianism
10. blank books for sketching or commonplace books
11. cartography
12. classic/historical feminism
13. daily life in military service, religious communities, and other closed societies
14. death
15. design in popular culture
16. disability cultures and histories
17. disasters and apocalypses
18. dollhouse miniatures
19. early aviation history and fighter pilots
20. Easy to low intermediate piano books (with songs I want to play)
21. epidemiology
22. ethology and domestication
23. etymology, toponymy, historical linguistics
24. fanworks and intellectual property rights
25. fiction that has been specifically recommended to me or fills in a series I've reread
26. field guides
27. fire
28. folk and historical textile arts
29. folklore and fold knowledge generally
30. fun with math & statistics & logic
31. history of games
32. gender and kinship across cultures
33. historical cookery
34. historic costume
35. historical sex and etiquette books and householders' companions
36. history of the blues
37. Iceland
38. invertebrate biology
39. anthropology case studies
40. kites
41. local history (for locations I have a personal connection to)
42. Lutheranism
43. mad science
44. mid-20th century or earlier comics, especially non-superhero
45. mythology and religion
46. native americans and the precolumbian americas
47. naturalists' lives
48. neuroscience case studies
49. Newspaper comics
50. paleontology
51. paranormal/pseudoscience/mystical/magical/general weird stuff topics
52. plants and fungi
53. poetry in translation
54. polar & alpine exploration
55. primitive skills/wilderness survival/self-sufficiency/things to do after global civilization collapses/etc.
56. public transit, vernacular architecture, and urban design
57. radio
58. rogue economists
59. science fiction and poetry writing
60. sketching and watercolor, scientific illustration
61. space exploration and travel, planetary bodies
62. pre-1970s children's books, especially Stratemeyer Syndicate ones
63. historic spies and pirates
64. Symbology, codicology, paleography, calligraphy
65. taxonomy and evolution
66. the labor movement
67. the global middle ages
68. things relevant to writing Captain America or Les Miserables canon periods or old copies of Hugo novels

¯_(ツ)_/¯

LOOK I HAVE A LOT OF SPECIAL INTERESTS OKAY

And yes I really do need multiple books on all these topics. I mean right now I'm working on an art project that so far requires books on calligraphy, Norse and Saxon decorative design, historic costume illustration, the history of playing cards, the Lewis chessmen, swords, and medieval cartography. And I did need all four calligraphy books because one has facsimiles of actual historic scripts, one has stroke-by-stroke (but less historically accurate) instructions for all the scripts, one has fewer scripts but teaches you about design as well as handwriting, and one has illuminated capitals.

And my current fanfiction project requires an equally tall stack on religion, 1st century history, the early Christian church, Jewish folklore and angelology.

And I just loaned a friend several books on knotwork and macrame for her newest project.

And I have another pile of Taoist-influenced philosophy and ancient China sitting aside for whenever I get back to working on The Book of Force Powers and/or writing Kunlun fic.

My books are, on the whole, not just sitting idly on the shelves, because I try not to get ones that will. (Hopefully at least 10-15% of them are though! That's the dream.)

...at least I have a nice starter list of tags to use in the catalog as I re-shelve?