To be fair, some of this falls in the realm of photo stylists and catalog shoots. It’s easier to coordinate backgrounds and colors with books ordered en masse like this
2 Likes
My wife has been organizing books on our shelves by color. More specifically, the ones on the shelves where she has to look at them.
She used to work in a library and at one point was considering getting a masters in library sciences, but neither of us are really up for organizing them in any other way at the moment.
“A stout, middle-aged man, with enormous owl-eyed spectacles, was sitting somewhat drunk on the edge of a great table, staring with unsteady concentration at the shelves of books. As we entered he wheeled excitedly around and examined Jordan from head to foot.
“What do you think?” he demanded impetuously.
“About what?”
He waved his hand toward the book-shelves.
“About that. As a matter of fact you needn’t bother to ascertain. I ascertained. They’re real.”
“The books?”
He nodded.
“Absolutely real — have pages and everything. I thought they’d be a nice durable cardboard. Matter of fact, they’re absolutely real. Pages and — Here! Lemme show you.”
Taking our scepticism for granted, he rushed to the bookcases and returned with Volume One of the “Stoddard Lectures.”
“See!” he cried triumphantly. “It’s a bona-fide piece of printed matter. It fooled me. This fella’s a regular Belasco. It’s a triumph. What thoroughness! What realism! Knew when to stop, too — didn’t cut the pages. But what do you want? What do you expect?”
I’ve run into uncut pages at the Library of Congress.
2 Likes
If you keep the now unbound pages, you can then feed them into a sheet scanner.
1 Like
So has Mark Foley.
Wow, that didn’t take long at all!
8 Likes
A quick estimate says the books currently on my phone would take up ten meters of shelf space and weigh 120kg in paper form. Before I got the Kindle app, books were becoming a genuine structural hazard in my apartment, and purging them was a major exercise (gasoline isn’t cheap) (j/k). So AFAIC there is no need to apologise for avoiding them.
When people get sanctimonious about the smell of real books etc., I just think “enjoy sniffing the seven or eight books you’ve ever owned” and go back to enjoying my uncollapsed floors while reading as much as I like.
2 Likes
8 Likes
Fujitsu ScanSnap ix500, I believe. Had to buy one to replace my old one that didn’t have drivers to work on Windows 10.
Interesting. On some of the forums I frequent, I constantly hear complaints about how Fujitsu and Apple (with MacOS 10.15) are engaged in a joint conspiracy to make expensive scanners obsolete. But if Windows 10 does the same thing, then maybe Apple isn’t being egregiously unreasonable.
(I own a SV600-- which doesn’t require destruction of the book. Alas, it doesn’t have anything as reasonable as a SANE driver)
I have no idea how many books I ha e in my kindle, but it’s a whole lot. I only get actual books theses days if that’s the only format it’s available in, it’s some kind of art book/comic book, or if it’s something I’m going to want to lend to people.
I’ve moved too far and too often to take many books with me, so all except the most recent ones have tended to be in boxes somewhere anyway.
Come to think of it - is organising your books by font a thing?
3 Likes
If I walked into a house and saw shelves of books arranged by color - and were clearly bought that way, i.e. they didn’t just have custom dust-jackets* - I’d assume they were a psychopath. There’s so much information conveyed by that. That they don’t read. (But vaguely want to give the impression that they do.) That they have no sense of aesthetics, so they can’t put any other aesthetically pleasing objects there, either.
Even if I didn’t have any books, which would be weird enough (even if all my new book purchases were electronic, I have old books that don’t exist digitally), I’d still have enough art and aesthetically pleasing curios (fossils, shells, bones, rocks, tiny prints of various sorts, etc.) to fill my shelves. None of which were expensive - at all. So if I didn’t have such objects, I could easily gather some at little cost. So it’s not just the lack of such things but the apparent inability to gather them themselves would be disturbing.
*(On the other hand, if someone had created custom dust jackets for all their books so they’d be color-coordinated, I’d assume they had a serious obsessive-compulsive disorder and be a bit worried about them…)
The only legitimate use for such things.
2 Likes
I had a driver availability keep my one Windows desktop on XP for far longer than it should have - it was for an audio interface rather than a scanner. The issue became moot when the wall wart went bad and toasted the box (without helpfully letting out any smoke to let me know this). That taught me to never buy Creative products.
I’m the same except for that one, because it kina covers everything. I do find myself wanting to lend people (in particular) politics-related titles, and it’s a shame when I can’t, but OTOH two-thirds of lent books never get returned so there’s a silver lining.
ETA also, if I lend someone a political screed, they’re probably not going to read it anyway.
Zubal books doesn’t specialize in books for their esthetic appeal, that is just one of the ways they sell them, along with bulk sales by weight. Their real specialty is rare books. When I was looking for an Emma Goldman first edition for a friend’s wedding, they were my first stop. Depending on the metric you use they are one of the largest bookstores in the world. The bulk and by the foot sales just let them move old stock that has no economic value any other way. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfHVK4x4JF0
1 Like
I like that color, I’ll add it to my collection.
Almost forty years ago in New York city I found a used copy of Steinbeck’s “The Long Valley”. It was a stand in the park, I assume now from the Strand. The seller was all excited about the cover, it was an early paperback version, I was glad to get a Steinbeck I didn’t have for maybe a dollar.
So some do judge books by their cover.
I think the house flipping fad has a role to play, with people paying more attention to “staging” when selling their house, so sellers want disposable props to dress up the rooms.
This is a really handy list. Friends of ours recently bought a house owned by a used book seller. There are thousands and thousands of books, mostly sci-fi paperbacks from the 50’s to the 80’s. I’ve had no luck finding anyone that wants to buy them; maybe one of these would.
One of the treasures we found was the original painting from PK Dick’s Ace paperback of Game Players of Titan. Can’t find the photo I took, but this is the cover.
2 Likes
The FFC (FGD135 Font Classification) is a library classification scheme still in use in parts of the home of FGD135.
I mean, if it helps you find books…
1 Like
I’m fairly sure the Strand in New York does the same - the leather or faux leather bound books with gold colored titles on the spine and incomplete sets seem likely. I seem to remember the area being at the rear of the ground floor - close to the customer service desk
