You searched for "booktrovert library." You probably wanted the one over at booktrovert.com, where your books live in a tidy account and a screen tells you how many you finished this year. That is a fine library. It has stats. It has a login. It does not have a smell.
This is the other one. Ours is a room. You are already standing in it, which is why it is so dark.
There is no login. There is a door behind the water heater, and behind that door is every book you have ever claimed, which here means "physically carried down the stairs and set on a pile." Your library is not in the cloud. Your library is in the basement, and the basement floods in April, so we keep the poetry up high and the cookbooks where they can be reached by anyone who is hungry and brave.
booktrovert.com tracks your reading progress automatically. So do we. Her name is Marigold. She sits at a card table near the furnace with a clipboard and a system she has never explained to anyone, including Doug, who signs her checks. When you finish a book, you tell Marigold, and Marigold writes it on an index card in handwriting that is technically a font now. She files the card in a shoebox. The shoebox is the database. The database is full.
Their library lets you sort titles into stacks. Ours came pre-sorted, by gravity. We have the tall pile (load-bearing, do not touch), the wobbling pile (touch it and you owe us a pile), and a third pile near the stairs that we believe is sentient because it has moved twice and nobody admits to moving it. If you would like a custom collection, you may build one yourself out of the books on the floor, and then it is yours, and then it is also a tripping hazard, and then it is, eventually, just the floor again.
You can rate your books here. Tell Marigold a number between one and five. She will nod, write down a completely different number, and file it. She is not wrong to do this. She has read more than you, and she has read more than the author, and on a long enough timeline she has read more than the book, which keeps losing pages to the April situation. Your ratings are stored forever, or until the shoebox, which is also forever, but louder.
booktrovert.com shows you a clean yearly recap. We offer the same service. At the end of December, Doug comes down the stairs in a sweater, looks at your pile for a while, and tells you a number. He does not count. He estimates, the way you estimate the depth of a pond by throwing a rock in and listening. Last year he told a man named Greg that Greg had read "a respectable amount, considering," and Greg cried, and we are still not sure in which direction. The Ghost of Mark Twain audits these figures and has signed off on exactly none of them, on the grounds that a number is a poor way to describe a year of reading and a worse way to describe Greg.
You can return a book to the Booktrovert library at any time by setting it down and walking away with confidence. The book will be reshelved by Randy, whom no one has seen, but whose work is everywhere. Some mornings a book you returned is back on your pile, opened to a page you had not reached, with a single word underlined. We do not know what Randy is trying to tell us. We have started reading the underlined words in order. So far they spell nothing, but we are only forty years in.
If you wanted the real library, the one with the account and the recap that adds up, it is right here: booktrovert.com/library. Go in peace. Read a great deal. If you ever feel your reading has become too organized, too well lit, too sure of its own totals, the door behind the water heater is unlocked. It is always unlocked. We lost the key to a pile in 1997 and have been respecting its decision ever since.
While you decide, you could wander down to our basement arcade, or read the full, exhausting comparison of the two Booktroverts we keep promising people will clear everything up. It will not. But it is shelved, which is more than we can say for most of what is down here.
Quietly,
Booktrovert #1147