Words are Weeds

I scored big points this Christmas when I gave Tom a subscription to LibraryThing, a social book cataloging Web site. For $25 you can get a lifetime membership that allows you to catalog an unlimited number of books. For another $15 you can purchase a CueCat, a little cat-shaped scanner that reads barcodes and pulls the information in from Amazon.com and other databases. With Librarything you can look at other people's catalogs, leave them comments, join groups, create tags for your entries, write book reviews and generally geek out with other bookworms. Even if you stay in your own catalog you can have hours of fun looking at your author cloud or perusing your collection in book cover view (the database pulls those in). The site generates statistics for your catalog--you can find out which other users share your books, and how many, either in raw or weighted terms. My favorite feature is "You and None Other" which shows other users who share exactly one book with you.

Tom spent the days after Christmas scanning in his books (about 1400 of them) and had so much fun he scanned in all of mine (about 560). It took a few late nights, but he finished before the new year. One day we logged in and found the same new user on the share list for each of our catalogs. The username looked familiar, and when we went to look at the catalog, we figured out that it belonged to a friend who now is in graduate school in California. We could actually see his catalog grow in real time as he added books. We later found out that a mutual friend of ours e-mailed him about LibraryThing, and he was so excited he didn't bother to reply--he rushed over to the site, bought his membership and started creating his catalog right there on the spot.

Shortly after my catalog was complete I read Walter Benjamin's "Unpacking My Library," in which he talks about the pleasures of collecting. The pleasures of collecting books are very different from the pleasures of reading them, and the collector is a species apart from other people who buy books. A beach vacation might not have much attraction for the book collector, who is happiest going from bookstore to bookstore in a new city. Acquiring new books for a collection can require some sleuthing; sometimes there is disappointment, sometimes the surprise of a great find. As the title "Unpacking My Library" suggests, the essay begins at a particular moment when Benjamin's books are scattered about, not yet sitting neatly on their shelves. Benjamin explains that the book collector moves between chaos and disorder, and that "every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories." As you unpack your books you remember, but not simply the contents of the book. You might also remember the moment you acquired it, or the time during which you read it. And of course there is the pleasure of rediscovery, coming across a book you forgot you even owned.

Benjamin also says that when he was young he was quite strict about which books would be included in his library. Until he understood the significance of collecting books, he would only include in his library books that he actually had read. I thought about this while reviewing my own LibraryThing catalog--I wondered if it was fair to include books that I owned but never got around to reading, or if it would be all right to include books I had read but no longer owned. And while Tom played thingamabrarian (that's an actual term) I found that I had to keep an eye on him. Right after he finished scanning in all of my books I discovered that he had been a little selective--a few of my science fiction books were missing. He's not a science fiction fan and apparently didn't want to be associated with one, either. Apparently, in the age of MySpace, your book collection helps create a persona that all the world can judge.

I recently bought a small bookcase because as you might imagine, we really needed the storage space. (I love books but hate it when they take over every horizontal surface.) We decided to move our art books there. Now, the art books section in our house is unusual because it represents one of the few places where we have combined our book collections. Long ago we merged our CD collections, and even share iTunes, but each of our book collections are shelved in separate spaces and we have lots of duplicates (108, to be exact).

Reshelving the art books made me remember...I remembered some books I hadn't looked at in years, and I also remembered the sight of Tom sitting there with stacks of books, scanning them in, first to his catalog and then moving on to mine. I started to wonder. So I went to Librarything and found out not only that art books were missing from my catalog, but had been scanned into his catalog. A book about Soviet propaganda porcelain that I picked up after seeing the exhibit at the Art Institute of Chicago, years before we even met! A book about American Colonial painting that I used as part of my research during my master's program! And it wasn't just art books--missing from my catalog, but in his, was Gunter Grass' novel The Flounder, a book I've been trying to get him to read for years without success. So apparently LibraryThing not only allows you to create an online persona, it can lead to acts of identity theft. And maybe couples counseling.