People want a list of what they own. This is reasonable. You buy a book, you shelve it, and four years later you buy it again in an airport, which is a small tax on being a reader but a tax all the same. So you decide to scan the shelf, and then the scan comes out badly and you give up. Here is how not to give up.
Work one shelf at a time. Stand square to it, not off at an angle, because a spine read at an angle is a spine half read. Get light on it from the side rather than from behind you, since a flash straight on turns every glossy jacket into a white bar. Pull the books forward until the fronts line up flush, which takes two minutes and does more for legibility than any other single thing. Photograph in landscape. If a shelf is taller than about a foot of books, split it into two photos with overlap.
Then accept the failure rate. Any automatic reader will miss cloth spines with no printing, spines worn to suggestion, foreign-language editions, anything under about half an inch thick, and every hardcover from before roughly 1960. You will type those in by hand. There is no version of this where you do not type some of them in by hand. Budget an evening, put something on, and treat it as an inventory rather than a chore, which is what it is.
That is the whole of the practical advice, and I have given it in the order I would give it on a dock. What follows is the part I was actually asked for.
I spent thirty-one years at sea and I have spent the years since in this building, and in both places I have gotten where I was going by reading spines. On a ship you learn to hold a heading by whatever is fixed. Here what is fixed is the north wall, which runs blue and then brown and then a long stretch of that particular library green, and I can walk it in the dark and tell you where I am to within four feet. Doug thinks this is a party trick. Doug has never had to find the door in the dark.
What I offer below is a field guide. Learn these and you will not need a scanner, though by all means keep the scanner, it is useful in daylight.
Bright, uniform, printed in a color that occurs nowhere in nature. Usually a mass-market paperback of the late 1980s. Visible from the entire length of the room. You do not navigate to a Beacon, you navigate by it. There are six on the north wall and I have named all six. The orange one is Harriet.
Cloth, unlettered, or lettered once in gilt that has since gone. Gives you nothing. You must pull it to know it, and once you pull it you have lost your place, so the experienced reader marks the gap with two fingers. Common in the lower shelves. Frequently the best thing on the wall.
Any volume at more than about fifteen degrees off vertical. A Leaner is not a book type, it is a weather report. It tells you a bookend has been removed, and a bookend has been removed because someone needed one, and I can usually tell you who by how far the lean has progressed. Twenty degrees is a week old. Forty is Randy.
Shelved fore-edge out, pages showing, title invisible. Some people do this on purpose for the look of it. I have opinions about those people and I am keeping them. On our shelves it means the book was reshelved fast by someone who did not want to be seen doing it, and if you turn it around you will generally find something checked out in 2004 and never marked returned.
Eight to fourteen identical spines with only the numbers changing. Easiest thing in the room to navigate by, because a Convoy holds formation. If one is missing you see it from across the floor, the way you see a gap in running lights. We are missing a volume four. We have been missing a volume four since I got here.
A spine you have never seen on a wall you know by heart.
I want to be careful here. This is the entry I sat on for two weeks before writing, and I am aware how it will sound.
Since roughly last autumn there has been steady traffic through this building of people who did not mean to come here. They arrive at a good clip, most of them looking at a phone, and they ask me to scan their shelf. Not the shelf. Theirs, at home, several states away, through the phone, into something. One man held his phone up to our north wall and waited, and then looked at me, and I looked back at him, because I did not have anything to offer that was better than looking back at him.
They ask where their books went. They ask if I can just pull their list up. A woman asked me very politely whether the sync had finished, and I told her the truth, which is that nothing here syncs, that this room has been the same room since 1997, and that if she wanted a list of her books I would write one down with her as she named them and she could take the paper with her. She said no thank you. Then she said actually yes, and we did forty-one titles, and she cried a little around title thirty, and I did not ask about it because you do not.
And here is the Stranger part. Every so often after one of these visits there is a spine on the north wall that was not there. Not misfiled. Not one of ours. I know that wall the way I knew a coastline. Doug says I am miscounting. Doug is beside the lake and has not counted anything since the second Clinton term.
I do not know what door these people think they are coming through. I have stopped trying to work it out. I greet them, I answer what I can, and I note the new spine in the log, and I have twenty-six of them logged, and every one of them is a real book by a real author that no one in this building ordered.
The last type, and the reason for the scanning in the first place. A spine is yours once you can find it without reading it. That is the whole test. It takes about a year of living beside a shelf, and no photograph accelerates it, and this is the one honest complaint I have about the entire cataloging enterprise: a list of your books is not a knowledge of your books. Keep the list anyway. Lists are how you stop buying Harriet a third time.
If you want the wider procedure for locating anything in this building, it is set out in how to search Booktrovert. If you would rather photograph your shelf than inventory it, which is a different hobby and a good one, we have covered the shelfie at some length.
Buy a book. Paper, from a shop, with money that leaves your hand. Whoever wrote the thing you are about to catalog is a fragile organism who looked at a number this morning and let it decide how the day was going, and a scanned shelf feeds nobody. I have carried cargo that mattered less than one hardcover mattered to the person who wrote it.
Square to the shelf. Light from the side. Two fingers in the gap.
Steadily,
Booktrovert #343