Random House Books

[gordonzola]

I spent most of yesterday inside, cleaning my room and enjoying the rain. My books have been piling up and taking over everything, so I decided they needed a good culling and re-ordering. I find that thought-provoking pairings always occur when you alphab etize your books, despite the theoretically intellectual randomness implied in organizing by letter rather than subject. I’ve always loved my "heavy hitters" section of Malatesta, Malcolm X, Mandela, and Mao. Unfortunately there’s a little fluff on both sides keeping Audre Lorde and Cherrie Moraga from joining the club.

But every time I rearrange and cull new combinations appear. I love that Proletarian Literature in the United States (put out by a Communist Party press in the ‘50s) sits next to Carol Queen, The Leather Daddy and the Femme. I think both Pat Califia and Raymond Chandler will feel awkward at first, but will then learn to appreciate each other’s no-nonsense style over time. The World Encyclopedia of Cheese appropriately sits next to the extremely cheesy Billy James Hargis who wrote The Real Extremists: The Far Left (a Red Scare classic -- They’re in the PTA!).

J. Edgar Hoover imprisoned between my bell hooks collection and The Prison Letters of George Jackson will make me avoid buying books by authors whose last names begin with "I". And I can’t really tell you why, but Advanced Master Handgunning by Charles Stephens seems to go well with either "Anarchism or Socialism" by Stalin (It’s been awhile, but I think he opted for "socialism"), or Passionate Mistakes . . . by Michelle Tea. I’m not sure about them as a trio, however.

Representing two sides of a thorny issue, Mordecai Siegel, in When Good Dogs Do Bad Things, argues, (according to the inscription by a dear friend) that it is "not the dog that is bad but the set of social relations in which the dog is enmeshed that reinforce certain qualities and tendencies". In Blowback, Christopher Simpson argues, just as convincingly, that the Nazi spy networks incorporated by the US immediately a fter World War II, did not, in fact, learn new tricks but continued working for Fascism in their new environments.

Not all the pairings are happy, of course. I’m sure that Paul Kivel, who’s Men’s Work: To Stop Male Violence is important but devoid of humor, wishes that Roadside America (by Doug Kirby) would disappear so that he could rest next to another feminist, Melanie Kaye Kantrowitz.

Most sadly there is a huge, and symbolic, gap between Covering Islam by Edward Said and a book on Israeli worker coops by Raymond Russell, despite their proximity in the alphabet.

Comments

Books.

[ninjaboy5150.livejournal.com]

That makes my bookshelf sound like a love in. :) Marks, Malcolm, and Plato I always wondered what they thought of Machiavelli and his prince? Could they really all afford to move to Utopia? The world my never know. :)

Re: Books.

[gordonzola.livejournal.com]

I somehow managed to leave Marx out of the "heavy Hitters" roll call. It's because all my Marx is out on loan. Is it a sign of the times that I forgot completely?

[jamie-miller.livejournal.com]

How is "advanced master handgunning"? It sounds intriguing.

[gordonzola.livejournal.com]

It's an adequate step-by-step. There's no substitue for the range, of course.

Oh my god.

[slit.livejournal.com]

YOU ARE MY HERO.

Where's that teen librarian?

[(Anonymous)]

Rolling in the grave your entry has surely put her in?--OG

Re: Where's that teen librarian?

[(Anonymous)]

Precicely. I mean, I suppose it's OK to alphabetize non-fiction, if that's what works for you - some people organize their personal libraries by spine dimensions, who am I to judge?

But interfiling fiction with purported non-fiction? -sd

Re: Where's that teen librarian?

[(Anonymous)]

And who decides what is fiction and what is fact? Where do you file Zami, my dear? Where do you file romans a clef (roman a clefs?)? In whose interest is this division? And what about poetry? Defend this practice in some way I can sink my teeth into!

xoOGˇ

Re: Where's that teen librarian?

[(Anonymous)]

You'll notice I said "purported". The fiction/non-fiction is an obfuscation we librarians tell kids to make it easier to do library tours. The division is false. Everything in a library, including "fiction", can have a Dewey number. If we wanted to catalog "fiction" in the strict Dewey sense it would end up in the 800s somewhere, but that would make the 800 section too huge to be useful. So we pull out novels and alphebetize them by author/title and call it "Fiction". "Non-Fiction" is by default anything not in that section, so it includes poetry, folklore, ghost stories, etc. The reasoning for pulling "fiction" out is the same some libraries use to pull out Biographies - it makes it easier for many readers to find what they want.

A roman a clef would likely end up classed as literature, i.e. in fiction. Zami ends up (at least in Berkeley) in the 920s as a biography, though that may be regional.

This is so just the surface of the intrigue that goes on behind the cataloging of books... If you know anyone in need of a thesis, I've got ideas...

But now there's a patron who needs me, so I'll stop.

-sd

Re: Where's that teen librarian?

[(Anonymous)]

Wow. Teeth sunk. Cool. Dewey was a wack job, eh? Now I know why my high school, named for him, was so fucking bizarre, with 22 "mods" in a 7-hour day, making up "bands" A through K, but of course not all met every day, and some bands met 5x a week and some 4x, and then there were the 5 "cycles" instead of semmesters or quarters or terms, except in my last year when they changed it to 4.

Heh! And you think libraries are confusing! (Oh, sorry, we should probably be talking about Gordon's stuff, eh?)--OGb