Id highly recommend keeping a digital list of the books you have physical copies of. I used to be a physical copy only person until my house burned down and I couldn't remember the titles for the insurance claim :(
Great advice! More time consuming, but can also get backup copies from places like libgen.is and then you have a list and searchable versions. Separate folders for the physical ones vs digital only.
I use the badreads app for it. FOSS and really handy, sorts by reading/read/to-read, can put your own reviews in it
I only have theory on my shelves (:no-copyright: no fun) and I've got it in chronological order, which works well and shows the development of Marxism over the years.
Starts with Principles of communism and ends with the third edition of super imperialism by Michael Hudson. If there were important additions in specific editions, like in Hudson's, I moved them forward. Doesn't make sense to put that in the 80's section when there's important added information on de-dollarisation from 2021.
Also have a handbook of Marxism by Emile Burns in between Das Kapital and what is to be done even though it includes later work because it's a collection of works from Marx through to Stalin. Only one that doesn't fit my system :angery: selected works of Mao Zedong volume 1 and 2 does work, I think because it's just one author
:blob-no-thoughts: can you tell I'm autistic
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Make sure you have a full list of your bookshelves; you can't organize if you don't know what you're organizing.
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Consult each of your bookshelves individually to find their opinion on organizing. Keep track (a spreadsheet is wise) of which are pro-organization and which are anti. If you find any strongly pro-organizing bookshelves, you can get them to help with the rest of this step.
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Ignore the anti-organizing bookshelves and work on any borderline cases. Continue until you're sure you have a majority of pro-organizing bookshelves.
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You're now ready to get all your bookshelves to sign a library card.
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I love these little apocryphal Lenin tales. Lenin is both too recent and too well-documented to be some kind of mythical hero, but I like all these little modern folktales about him that still find ways to imbue him with a kind of supernatural cleverness. It's fun
my books are just stacked haphazardly all over the place, with a good portion of them loaned (likely permanently) to friends and acquaintances.
also what a great opportunity to plug a site someone here mentioned a while ago for buying physical books:
bookfinder.com
Me too. A stack on my desk, two on the radiator, one on the bedside table, some books in different bags and so on lmao. My uncle was such an avid reader he filled all his shelves and had stacks on the floor that were as big as me as a 10 year old then.
I put the books I like less on the top shelves because they're uncovered and thereby get more dust and sun exposure.
From the opening sentence I thought that was gonna be a "My family was persecuted by evil Soviet Russia" post
I'm reading through Krupskaya's memoir right now and she mentions this story! I'll post the excerpt in a bit :lenin-cat:
Just then, as luck would have it, the police came down on us with a search warrant. They had found somewhere a postal receipt for a letter which Lyakhovsky had written to Vladimir Ilyich. The letter was about a tombstone for Fedoseyev, and this was a good enough excuse for the gendarmes to make a search. This was done in May 1899. They found the letter--quite an innocent one--and went through our correspondence without finding anything of interest. By old habit acquired in St. Petersburg, we kept our illegal correspondence apart from the rest. It was not much of a hiding place, though--the bottom shelf of the bookcase. Vladimir Ilyich pushed up a bench for the gendarmes to stand on, and they began their search from the top shelves, which were lined with various statistical publications. They got so tired they did not even look at the bottom shelf, and were satisfied with my statement that it only contained my books on pedagogics.
Even if we did I'd never be able to find it due to our horrible emote naming convention that I've been yelling about for years :angery:
The Dewey Decimal System is -- and I feel a bit sheepish saying this but I swear it isn't a bit -- outdated and eurocentric.
I do them by size for aesthetic, especially because a lot of my reading is done digitally and I don't really come back to books that I've read.
Otherwise I'd say alphabetically
Ive got a small shelf Nd its top shelf theory/biographies/ps3, middle shelf "adult" fiction, bottom shelf "YA" fiction
