Tagged: organizing books

April 3, 2007

My LibraryThing Anniversary

One year ago today I opened up a free LibraryThing account, and I loved it so much that a few days later I converted it to a lifetime account. What is LibraryThing? Here’s the official answer: LibraryThing is an online service to help people catalog their books easily. You can access your catalog from anywhere–even on your mobile phone. Because everyone catalogs together, LibraryThing also connects people with the same books, comes up with suggestions for what to read next, and so forth. I love everything about LibraryThing–how...

Book Review / Books and Reading

April 2, 2007

Book Review: The Book on the Bookshelf

The ordinary is always more fascinating than we think. Chesterton knew this, and Henry Petroski knows it. Petroski’s The Book on the Bookshelf traces the development of the bookshelf as a reflection of the changing nature of books, and in the process he reminds us that nothing is too ordinary to be written about. The book is part history, part personal reflection and part social science. From descriptions of medieval libraries to debates about where to place bookshelves in a library, Petroski writes in an engaging and warm...