Auntie Mame is such a wonderful movie. “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him think!” Ouch. Avoid the Lucille Ball version.
This might explain the mystery book. There does not seem to be a book of that name.
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I’ve discovered it’s less fun when Amazon rearranges the books for me. I hadn’t realized how well I could identify previously-read ebooks by glancing at the covers - until they changed some of the cover art. There’s no way to make it stop, either. 
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I’m married to a librarian (public library job and everything)… I had to completely separate out my books in order to find anything when I wanted it, because my spouse doesn’t organize theirs AT ALL.
(My mother-in-law, a former academic, keeps her books by Library of Congress Classification. I think my spouse may be too intimidated by that to ever deal with ours.)
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What if they were classicists? Red covers are Latin, and green are Greek in the Loeb Classical Library. The books all look the same other than that, with the obvious exception of author and title. And the related I Tatti Renaissance Library (post-Classical Latin) has blue covers.
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Can’t you just reopen that one, since you created it in the first place? I’m not sure what the rules are for closed threads.
While I am going to enjoy looking through the original thread, my wife and I would have a fair amount we could contribute to a new thread or a continuation of this one. As a quick estimate, I’d say we have around 15 bookshelves in our house and even more books that aren’t shelved. Some of the shelves that have paperbacks go three stacks deep. And no, there’s nothing coordinated about them, color or otherwise really. We’ve each tried organizing our own shelves, but… it never works out for long.
And speaking of blind book bags, my wife picked up a “mystery” themed one from our nearby Entertainmart. She was quite happy with what she got. I’m reluctant to show her the original post about books-by-the-foot. That’s Pandora’s Books.
Only for mystery novels
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*rimshot
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Linear book-feet are generally full of old mass-produced volumes that nobody actually wants or which don’t have considerable literary value, like old compilations of Reader’s Digest or other magazines. They do tend to be used as sources of material for staging houses and apartments for sale, just as hotels tend to be good sources for furniture for the same purpose. If they weren’t in these bundles they’d likely end up pulped.
I learned about this phenomenon because the person who made the real-life Myst book has talked about it; the specific book that Cyan used as the base texture for most of the books in the game (Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, Volume LIV, Issue 312, December 1876 to May 1877) is the sort that end up in collections of linear book-feet.
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That’s one of those highly specific exceptions that… well, still wouldn’t justify having fully-color-coordinated shelves, as even a classicist isn’t only going to have books by that one publisher. I mean, that would still be weird - like they’re some sort of pretend classicist who just got a selection of books from one publisher to fake it…
My first reaction was horror, of course, but when I perused some of the titles in the bundles it occurred to me that this is a way to sample a bunch of books you would never have thought to read, but might by chance find interesting. You could occasionally get rid of ones that wind up having no appeal at all, and refresh your collection with another set of random topics. In the right colors, naturally.
I don’t think so… at least not that I can see. I don’t see a clear button that says I can re-open it…
At Ikea they have real books in the fake rooms but they’re all in Swedish.
I guess it’s on-brand but it would also make it unlikely that anyone will try to steal them.
There is something to be said for not bringing your work home. I am personally thinking of getting crazy and arranging my (physical) books into categories of read and not-read.
Also, for your random book purchase needs there is always the Bibliomat.
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They have real books at Ikea? I’m not sure I noticed. I have noticed that they were Swedish books.
Their computers n display are fake, so I assumed the bokks were.
Can one really read the Dictionary?
OK. I admit it. I’m a hoarder. I have more linear meters of books than most of you, and a hundred books on kindle besides (plus several hundred samples). But when I buy hardcopy books, it’s very often for reference.
Why do I have an old copy of Roberts French-English? Because I’ve been tripped up before by freely available online resources-- and those digital alternatives with the technical precision I need are horribly expensive.
(And sometimes, it’s to digitize the books for the good of some community or other.)
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We have some books collections like that. The SO found a collection of early “Tom Swift” books…all nicely bound. Tho some really beat up. Used…I like used books. They have soul.
And some leather (kinda) bound ‘pipfitters handbook’ in a collection that covers things like generators, steam power, etc. Probably from the 1920’s.
Also one day…one day. I shall have the “Virginia” collection of Robert Heinlein reprints.
Every time I read a Arkham House edition of trashy pulp, I’m somewhat in awe.
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I use the library and epub versions of books to keep my hording instincts somewhat in check.
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