Yeah, no kidding. When I were a lad, the books in our house came in four general sizes: “pocket” paperback (somewhat like the size of a DVD case), “trade paperback” (which was maybe 20% taller and pretty uncommon in my house), your standard hardcover, and coffee-table. There were some variances within those four general categories (especially among the hardcovers, of course), but you could have an awfully long shelf of paperbacks from a dozen publishers that were all the same height and depth.
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And shelf spacing is the irritating thing about Ikea’s Billy bookcases. You can buy extra shelves but if you use the holes provided, there is always one shelf that is slightly too low for putting most mass market paperbacks. I had to drill an extra set of holes to evenly space the shelves for paperbacks.
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As someone who had the pleasure to both learn all those algorithms and work in an archive, I wholeheartedly agree.
I did just that twice a week for a year. Not quite that many new files at a time though.
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I do it like this.
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OK, the title was “fastest way to alphabetize 1,000+ books” but it should be "the fastest way you can explain to a computer how to…"
The 9.5 days nonsense doesn’t matter. If this is happening on a computer, all methods are of negligibly equal time, a matter of milliseconds.
If you’re sorting books in real life, you would never start with a bubble sort, knowing on its face it is super inefficient. I would (and have) grab the As, Bs, Cs, etc and make smaller piles that I could manage by hand. Or get 25 helpers to each grab all the books of a single letter. (Ooooh, I hope I get Z!!!)
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Ah, a parallelizable bucket sort! Now yer talkin’!
I do wish people would quit using quicksort for its (completely neglibile, as you note) speed advantage on moderate-sized data sets, ESPECIALLY sets that can be sorted and sub-sorted on multiple keys (name, address, age, zip code, etc), because quicksort isn’t a stable* sorting algorithm — i.e., it doesn’t preserve pre-existing order of identical keys. )
Stable sorts can sub-sort on multiple keys just by sorting on each key in turn, bottom-up.
Users faced with dynamic click-on-header-to-sort tables and the like should be able to do multicolumn sorts just by sorting on each header in turn. Drives me nuts when that won’t work because the programmer used quicksort because… It’s The Fastest!! ™
(Unless, of course, quicksort grinds to a near-halt because it recursively-over-allocates memory until it has to repeatedly swap to disk and back. (-: )
*(see Wikipedia:Sorting algorithm:Stability )
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Mike Bostock has some beautiful static visualizations of sorting algorithms in his Visualizing Algorithms essay.
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Do you really mean author, or pseudonym? Would you intersperse Iain Banks and Iain M. Banks? Or mix Richard Bachman and Stephen King?
Even if they’re a chronological series written out of order (like the Narnia books)?
I won’t sleep tonight for worrying that my bookshelves are ordered incorrectly.
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There’s a strong argument for reading books in their written order. Especially the Chronicles of Narnia. It’s much more interesting to find out where the lamppost came from after seeing it in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.
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Well, there’s another question, then- should one shelve books in the order they should be read?
Some editions of the Narnia books have numbers on the spines, so they’d be shelved 2-4-5-6-3-1-7 if you did them in publication order.
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What kind of librarian would simply put 1280 books on the shelves, without recording them in the catalog first? If it’s already afternoon, and you’re the one and only librarian there, there’s no way you could catalog them all before tomorrow. Not even if you worked all night until the students arrive the next day.
A normal librarian would just put all these books to one side, and process them at a normal rate. If any students wants these books, then … “tough, you’ll get them when you get them. These books just arrived yesterday and I need a couple of days to process them. Meantime, there are plenty of other books in the library”.
Alternate scenario. It’s closing time, and you’ve shooed out the last students. You see there are 1280 books on the library’s one and only (and extremely long) “used books” shelf. They’re all mixed up. You need to sort them alphabetically. You have 1 hour to do that before your car pool ride arrives. Otherwise, you’re spending the night in the library as there are no public transport to your home.
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I volunteer to help you with the “X” stack. 
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When our library started, we had about 500 books. The greatest amount of time taken was not the sorting, but the “moving books from one shelf to the next” part. We use the dewey system, so every book gets a class number, and they are sorted by that. Trouble comes when you’re adding books to it’s section, and you see that that shelf is full. So you move some of the books to the next shelf, but that shelf is full, so you move some of those books … if only we had one long, gigantic shelf, and you can just push the books, and everything would move, and you can insert books where you want to.
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Whoever designed those collections are terrible monsters. I’d shelve them in publication order, numbers on the spine be damned.
There’s arguments on both sides for reading order but I tend to side with the ones that point out that the text of the later published books make assumptions that the reader is already familiar with the world of Narnia.
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I thought I was the only person bookshelf-obsessive enough to do that. Greetings fellow perfectionist!
I always read that kind of series in written order first, then re-read in chrono order at some later date after I’ve gotten fuzzy on the story details.
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In the right context (and, as @stellans7 suggest, with a small enough set) it can work. I had a professor when i was a grad student who kept the books in his office sorted by color. So, for example, all the yellow Springer books would be together.
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Sounds like Dvořak symphonies. His first published symphony was the sixth one he wrote. He had written for unpublished symphonies discovered after his death. So, the New World symphony has been called his 5th, 8th, and 9th symphony.
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And then after @Professor59 accepts your offer, you learn that he’s heavily into Mixtec authors and the X’s are in fact over-represented.
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Albanian. Lots of q and x.
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An author’s real or pen-name doesn’t affect the organization of my books. And books in a series go in the order of events as they take place within that series.
For example:
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer would be followed by Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. And it wouldn’t matter if I consider them written by Mark Twain or Samuel Clemens, all his books would still be together.
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