Learning to be a librarian

 

This is not just a first world problem. It���s a first world ACADEMIC  problem. So please take it in the sense it is meant.

We have just built a new bit of book-shelf extension onto the house (thanks to the excellent Henry Freeland, Andrew Turner and Bob Button ��� all of whom, if you want to know, are highly recommended). The fact is that I have two shared offices half full of books, and every floor in the house is piled high. So now is the moment to take action (I am thinking about retirement when those two half-offices no longer exist) and to put the old books on the new shelves. The fact is that we are now coming to see what librarians have been working on, and trying to sort out, for centuries.

First of all, how do we manage between us (husband and me) to have so many duplicates or triplicates. When I bought (cheaply) a second-hand of the 2003 National Gallery Titian Exhibition a few weeks ago, did I not realise that we had two already (no, because they were in those unsorted piles on the floor)?

But just as pressing is the size and shape of the books. We are well used to the Cambridge University Library system of classification by size (from ���a��� big, to ���d��� small), but it does seem a bit self-aggrandizing to do that at home. All the same, even when you try to do it in a small way, you get clobbered.

I can���t tell you how many series of books have changed their size (that must really irritate the UL. So you start putting Penguin Classics (or Cambridge ���Green and Yellows���) onto their own perfectly appropriately sized shelf���.then ffs you discover that a few years ago they get bigger and don���t fit. Meanwhile, the Journal of Roman Archaeology and the Journal of Roman Studies have downsized, and didn���t actually need those supersized shelves allocated.

And that is before you get to all those knotty questions of classification. Does a book about the nineteenth-century history of Pompeii go with archaeology or classical reception? Blow me if I know���

��� but I do know that I cant retire till I get these books sorted (I have 5 years to go, and on this rate of progress it will take me that long to have a decent few shelves).

If I have ever poured scorn on the librarian���s skill, this is the time for me to eat humble pie.