Organizing Books

[Wren of the Brown]

So, a few things prompted this thread.  First,  I'm moving again.  I'd rather not elaborate but I've talked about it in other threads here at the Kin.  In every move I've ever made, I try to organize my humble library into something that resembles an ordered structure and, well, it's good to have them organized where they can lounge like beloved creatures in the morning sun.  It's also organizing month here at the Kin, so I thought, why not?  This is all your fault, Lor.
 
As I get them boxed, I'm getting them categorized and inventoried.  I lost three boxes of books by accident a few months ago - they were confused with a pile of discards meant for the thrift store.  It wasn't that big of a deal in hindsight.  There were four or five titles in there that I absolutely wanted to save but the rest, I guess, were bound for the thrift shop anyway.  I just hated having that choice made for me.
 
I won't be doing this all at once, so I'll post a new list as I get them boxed.
 
Let us begin.  *blows dust off a creaky book*
 
Medieval and Renaissance Lit
 

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• Anglo-Saxonry, Old English & Beowulf
  • Beowulf, trans. Seamus Heaney
  • The Beowulf Poet, Donald K. Fry
  • An Anthology of Old English Poetry, trans. Charles W. Kennedy
  • The Word Exchange: Anglo-Saxon Poems in Translation
  • Ecclesiastical History of the English People - Bede
  • Life of Bede - collection of smaller works by Bede
  • Plain English: A Wealth of Words by Bryan Evans (this is an undertaken bid to make a likeness of Modern English if the Normans hadn't worsted England.  This doesn't reckon for the Brythonic ready-speech unsaddled and shunted by the Anglo-Saxons and so on.  For framework, see Rikecraft and the English Tung by Orwell and Poul Anderson's outlandish and long-worded Uncleftish Beholding. I may or may not have put my brain to task in Plain English for this bewriting.
• Chaucer
  • Complete Poetry and Prose of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. John Fisher
  • Canterbury Tales in Modern English, trans. J.U. Nicolson (not a very good rendering but it has some swell art-deco illustrations by Rockwell Kent.)
  • Norton Critical Chaucer: Troilus and Criseyde, ed. Stephen A. Barney
  • Norton Critical Chaucer: Canterbury Tales, ed. V.A. Kolve & Glending Olson
  • The Age of Chaucer, Valerie Allen
  • Critical Interpretations: The Knight's Tale, ed. Harold Bloom
• Middle English
  • Medieval English Lyrics, ed. R. T. Davies - a swell anthology of English verse from 12th to 16th centuries
  • Middle English Literature, ed. Charles W. Dunn & Edward T. Byrnes - another swell collection verse from 12th to 16th and a few nuggets from the Scottish Renaissance
  • Oxford Book of Narrative Verse, ed. Iona & Peter Opie - a collection of heroic narrative poems.  I want to put a few of these to memory for bardic circles.
  • Norton's Le Morte D'Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory, ed. Stephen H. A. Shepherd

 

I'll resume this later with Early Modern and Shakespeare and zoom into, um... more books, I guess.

[Wren of the Brown]

Early Modern (I guess this is a catch-all category for everything after Malory that isn't Shakespeare.)

 

 

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• Norton: Ben Jonson and the Cavalier Poets, ed. Hugh Maclean.  Ben Jonson and his lot.  Nuff said.
• Poems of John Donne - this is one of my favorite books.  Heads will roll if this is ever lost or stolen.  It's a fascimile of Donne's original 16th century manuscripts and folios.
• Renaissance Poetry, ed. Leonard Dean
• The Golden Hind: An Anthology of Elizabethan Prose and Poetry, ed. Roy Lamson & Hallet Smith. 
• The Palace of Pleasure: Elizabethan Versions of Italian and French Novels.

I just realized I'm missing something by Andrew Marvell and the rest of the Metaphysical poets. That is a thing which must be remedied!

 

 

 

 

Shakespeare

 

 

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• Norton: Complete Shakespeare
  • Tragedies
  • Histories
  • Comedies
  • Romances and Poems
• I also have a stack of individual works that aren't the time to put here.  These are mostly editions I've bought when I didn't want to lug the Nortons to class.  One of them I should probably throw away as its probably saturated with asbestos fibers but its a really pretty 1920 school text of A Midsummer Night's Dream I found in the basement of a school we were remodeling.  It promptly disappeared and found its way to my bookshelf.  Mystery abounds, my friends.
• Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human by Howard Bloom
• Northrop Frye on Shakespeare.
• Twayne's Critical: Measure for Measure by Harriet Hawkins
• The Bedford Companion to Shakespeare by Russ McDonald
• Sources and Analogues of A Midsummer Night's Dream by Frank Sidgwick - another book which will result in death, trauma and mayhem if it ever goes up missing and not because only 1,000 were ever printed.  It's a compendium of sources, folklore and poesy which Shakespeare likely drew from and is probably the best source I have for period fairy tales.

 

[Wren of the Brown]

Religion - I'm not much of anything but you can see where my preferences lie.  I grew up with some pretty bizarro theology (Reformed Christian Calvinism) and it's taken quite a long time to unscramble my head.

 

 

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• Christianity
  • Confessions of Saint Augustine
  • Apologia Pro Vita Sua by John Henry Newman
  • Meister Eckhart: Selected Writings
  • Holy Silence: Gift of Quaker Spirituality by J. Brent Hill
  • Plain Living: A Quaker Path to Simplicity
  • Quaker Spirituality: Selected Writings
  • Some Fruits of Solitude by William Penn
  • A Jonathan Edwards Reader (if I had to choose between Calvin and Edwards, I think I'd just shoot myself instead.)
  • Theology of the Old Testament, 2 volumes by Walter Eichrodt
  • Isaac Asimov's Guide to the Bible
  • The Holiness of God by R.C. Sproul
  • Pleasing God by R.C. Sproul (both books were gifts from my parents and we have gone in circles over this.  I keep them around and pull them out every now and then but I just end up grinding my teeth.)
• C.S. Lewis
  • Mere Christianity
  • The Abolition of Man
  • The Great Divorce
  • Of Other Worlds
  • The Mind Awake: Selected Writings
• Judaism
  • Koren Tanakh
  • JPS Torah
  • Schocken Bible: The Five Books of Moses, trans. Everett Fox (this is a really amazing translation that attempts to render the poetic wordplay of Hebrew into English.)
  • Jewish Literacy by Rabbi Joseph Telushkin
  • Basic Judaism by Rabbi Milton Steinberg
  • The Bedside Torah by Rabbi Bradley Shavit Artson
  • Talmudic Anthology: Tales and Teachings of the Rabbis, ed. Louis J. Newman
  • Understanding the Talmud by Ernest R. Trattner
  • Everyman's Talmud by Abraham Cohen
  • The Guide for the Perplexed by Moses Maimonides
  • Maimonides by Abraham Joshua Heschel
  • God in Search of Man by Abraham Joshua Heschel
  • Man is Not Alone by Abraham Joshua Heschel
  • A Book of Life: Embracing Judaism as a Spiritual Practice by Michael Strassfeld
  • The Inner Journey: Views from the Jewish Tradition
  • Why the Jews Rejected Jesus by David Klinghoffer
  • Every Day, Holy Day (A programmed manual for mustar, which is, I guess, a very close parallel to the virtue ethics.  I never completed it >_>)
  • Kabbalah by Gershom Scholem
  • On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism by Gershom Scholem
  • Zohar: The Book of Splendor - Basic Readings, ed. Gershom Scholem
  • The Essential Kabbalah ed. Daniel C. Matt
• Martin Buber
  • On Judaism
  • Knowledge of Man
  • I and Thou
  • Martin Buber's I and Thou: Practicing Living Dialogue by Kenneth Paul Kramer (this is sort of a how-to manual for applying Buber's I and Thou in daily life.  Buber loved wordplay and I and Thou is a little murky at times, so it's helpful to bring smarter people into the conversation.)
• Zen and Mindfulness - I deal with depression and anxiety and the best solution so far has been to let myself get out of my way.
  • Mindulness in Plain English by Bhante Henepola Gunaratana
  • Wherever You Go, There You Are by Jon Kabat-Zinn
  • The Unfettered Mind by Takuan Soho, trans. William Scott Wilson (on fighting and mindfulness.)
  • Wisdom of Insecurity by Alan Watts

 

[Wren of the Brown]

Philosophy - in another life which seems very far away, I was a philosophy major in a sleepy farm town.

 

 

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History of Philosophy, General Anthologies and Introductory Readers

• The Story of Philosophy by Will Durant (Everyone should own this book.)
• Mayfield Anthology of Western Philosophy ed, Daniel Kolak (Oh, my first anthology!  It's so wee!)
• Philosophic Problems: An Introductory Book of Readings ed. Maurice Mandelbaum & Others
• Reason and Responsibility: Readings in Some Basic Problems of Philosophy, ed. Joel Feinberg
• Philosophy and the American School by Van Cleve Morris (I won't call this an essential but it certainly is one that I return to.  It's an introduction to the instruction of philosophy in the American school and the problems inherent in the endeavor.  If I ever have my own classroom, it will have a welcome place on my desk.)
• Introduction to Philosophy by G.T.W. Patrick (Another title that I keep returning to.  It's dated and it shows but it was written at a time when the problems of modernity where starting to rear their ugly heads [the fully automatic mechanical universe, Post-War doubt, atomic ethics, population control, etc.] but it's also written in such a way that these issues aren't a burden but a challenge we are fit to tackle.  There's real curiosity and optimism here, so I keep it around for that.  Midcentury optimism?  Perish the thought!)

Greek and Roman Philosophy: Drinking the Hemlock Because One Must

• Hesiod - Theogony, trans. Norman O. Brown
• Hesiod - Works and Days & Theogony, trans. Stanley Lombardo ("Don't, if you come across a sacrifice burning, // Find fault with what the fire consumes.  // The god will visit you with nemesis for sure.")
• From the Presocratics to the Present: A Personal Odyssey by Daniel Kolak. (Kolak is an interesting fellow.  You should look up his work on individuality some time.)
• Thales to Aristotle, ed. Reginald E. Allen
• Greek and Roman Philosophy After Aristotle, ed. Jason L. Saunders
• Philosophy Before Socrates: An Introduction with Texts and Commentary, ed. Richard D. McKirahan (Oh, Greek Phil 240.  What a sweet kid you were.)
• Hellenistic Philosophy: Stoics, Epicureans, Sceptics by A.A. Long
• The Older Sophists: A Complete Translation by Several Hands of the Fragments in Die Fragmente Der Vorsokratiker, Edited by Diels-Kranz with a new edition of Antiphon and of Euthydemus, ed. Rosamond Kent Sprague (Tee hee!  How dare you defend the Sophists, Beorn!  My classmates hated me - they wanted Teh Truth and I wanted to exercise a contrarian curiosity.)
• Xenophon - Conversations of Socrates
• Plato - The Laws
• Plato - The Republic
• Collected Dialogues of Plato ed. Edith Hamilton & Huntingdon Cairns
• Introduction to Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon ("With regard to pleasantness in the giving of amusement the intermediate person is ready-witted and the disposition ready wit, the excess is buffoonery and the person characterized by it a buffoon, while the man who falls short is a sort of boor and his state is boorishness." - as close to looking into the mirror as I've ever had in a book.)
• Aristotle - The Nicomachean Ethics :3
• Aristotle - The Metaphysics
• Seneca - Letters from a Stoic.  (Just selections.  Someday, I'll get the complete work.)
• Marcus Aurelius - Meditations, trans. Martin Hammond
• The Essential Marcus Aurelius, trans. & selected by Needleman and Piazza (This is my go-to translation for Mr. Aurelius.  It's a much more engaging version than Hammond's translation, which is still very nice if one wishes to read Marcus Aurelius.)
• Lucretius - On the Nature of the Universe, trans. Ronald Latham
• Lucretius - The Way Things Are: The De Rerum Natura of Titus Lucretius Carus, trans. Rolfe Humphries (I love this translation! 

The ways of death can not prevail forever,

Entombing healthiness, nor can birth and growth

Forever keep created things alive.

There is always this great elemental deadlock,

This warfare through all time.  The keen for the dead

Blends with the cry that new-born babies raise

At their first shock by the light.  Night follows day,

Dawn follows eventide, and never a one

That has not heard these feeble pulings sound

Through the more dark and somber threnodies.

• Pagan Virtue - An Essay in Ethics by John Casey (A comprehensive look at Pre-Christian Heroic ethics with a bit of Nietsczhe thrown in for good measure.)
• The Trial of Socrates by I.F. Stone
• Socrates Meets Marx: A Socratic Dialogue on The Communist Manifesto by Peter Kreeft (Even if you don't agree with some of the conclusions that Kreeft makes through Socrates, it's still a worthwhile read.
• The Other Side of Virtue by Brendan Myers (Another examination of Heroic ethics; Myers has some biases that tend to get in the way of his work but overall, it's a good read.)
• A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy by William B. Irvine (A useful read for applying Stoic principles.)

 

 

I think I'm done for the night.

[U4ea]

So, you're organizing them by topic in the boxes. Is that how they'll go onto your shelves, too? I organize by what I'm into, do I guess that is sorta topic-based. I reorganize my shelves about once a year, though. ;-)

 

And I'll happily take that blame, dude! Organize away!

[Ryrin]

Awesome books. I know a kid named "Bede." I love to read about religion & history.

[Wren of the Brown]

Enlightenment and Modern Philosophy

 

 

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• What We Can't Not Know: A Guide by J. Budziszeswki (an examination of natural law)
• The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell, ed. Robert E. Egner
• The Law by Frederic Bastiat
• The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science by Richard Holmes
• Doubt: A History by Jennifer Michael Hecht (a history of sceptical inquiry)
• The Road to Serfdom by F.A. Hayek
• The Good Life by E. Jordan (an inquiry into ethical theory in response to radical individualism; an interesting read.)
• Ethics by Dietrich Bonhoeffer
• Shop Class as Soulcraft by Matthew B. Crawford (a life-changing book for me.  Actually, I'd say it was one of two that drew me back from the brink.)
• Forbidden Knowledge by Roger Shattuck (an examination of the limits of wholesome knowledge and free information and media immersion.)
• The Perennial Philosophy by Aldous Huxley
• Problems of the Self by Bernard Williams (I actually haven't read this yet.  It was gifted to me and I've never been able to get behind it but I can never discard it, either.)
• Anarchy, State, and Utopia by Robert Nozick
• Hegel: The Essential Writings, ed. Frederick Weiss (not a fan of Hegel.  Nope.)
• Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics by Immanuel Kant
• Discourse on the Method by Rene Descartes (I'm in a minority who look upon Descartes with hesitation and annoyance.)
• The Decline of the West by Oswald Spengler
• The Complete Marquis de Sade: Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom and Other Writings (yes, well.)

Kierkegaard

• The Essential Kierkegaard, ed. Howard & Edna Hong (an accessible introduction to Kierkegaard's major themes.)
• Works of Love
• Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing (I'd recommend this to anyone struggling to understand religious motivations.)
• The Soul of Kierkegaard: Selections from His Journals, ed. Alexander Dru

.

Nietszche

• Twilight of the Idols
• The Anti-Christ
• Thus Spoke Zarathustra
• The Portable Nietzsche, ed. Walter Kaufmann
• A Nietzsche Reader, ed. R.J. Hollingdale

American Philosophy

• The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America by Louis Menand
• Classic American Philosophers, ed. Max H. Fisch (Peirce, James, Royce, Santayana, Dewey, Whitehead)
• Men and Movements in American Philosophy by Joseph L. Blau (a book I return to in my attempt to understand how we got to this peculiar moment)
• Walden & Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau

 

[michellem]

About half our books are packed away now, we simply don't have the shelf space to keep all up, so what's up now is favourite books that I want easily accessible. I've got three very small (barely a meter and a half tall) bookscases. So right now, they're grouped a bit randomly. One shelf is cookbooks and designbooks and coffeetable-type books, two are graphic novels and comic books, and the rest are sorted either in what belong together genre-wise (one shelf for more YA-type books, one for more epic fantasy, WoT takes up an entire shelf, and the last one is a bit of everything.) We also store all our boardgames in the bookshelf, so... That takes up an entire shelf too.

 

Eventually, when we get enough space, I'll probably just sort them alphabetically. Although that bothers me a bit too; I like my books to be neat, so it really bothers me when my books are differently sized within the same series, especially if the earlier books are smaller than the newer (or a book or two in the middle is differently sized. It's ok if the first one is biggest and they then get smaller). This will lead to me buying a boxed set of them eventually and getting rid of the mismatched sizes...

[Rasheta Ardashir]

You are a far better person then I am. All my books are all over the place stacked on top of each other etc. I did try and get them in order once and then bought a bunch more books and that didn't work out. LOL 

[Moon Sedai]

My sister found a site:

Libib.com

 

It allows you to make a catalog of your books with a smartphone. Or you can buy a UPC scanner and it will record them. 

 

 

I haven't tried it yet. 

 

I organize by weird classifications known only to me and my husband. 
 

[michellem]

I feel ya with the weird system only you and your hubs know, Moon. We have it that way with DVD's. It's an extremely logical system for us. Others wonder why Harry Potter, Tangled and Marie Antoinette are on the same shelf XD

[Wren of the Brown]

Sci-Fi/Fantasy Omnibuses 

 

If I really like a series, I get the omnibus.  Thankfully, there is no WoT omnibus.  My poor back couldn't handle the strain.

 

 

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• Hyperion Cantos - Dan Simmons
• Foundation Trilogy - Isaac Asimov
• More Than Complete Hitchhikers Guide - Douglas Adams
• Myst: The Book of Atrus - Rand & Robyn Miller
• Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox - Barry Hughart
• Titus Groan - Mervyn Peake
• The Once and Future King - T.H. White
• Merlin Trilogy- Mary Stewart
• Prydain Chronicles - Lloyd Alexander
• Great Book of Amber - Roger Zelazny
• Time Quartet - Madelaine L'Engle
• Compleat Dying Earth - Jack Vance
• Latro in the Mist - Gene Wolfe

 

 

Poetry

 

This section really needs the most work.  I'm a huge fan of the American Imagists and you'll see that influence in my own work but I like anything that's a.) readable and b.) not a vanity printing.  Publishers will often combine pamphlets into an anthology, so any such work will just say Selected by So-and-So unless it has another title.

 

 

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• Opened Ground - Seamus Heaney
• Translations from the Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. M.D. Herter Norton
• Letters to a Young Poet - Rilke
• Collected Poems 1912 - 1944 by Hilda Doolittle (Oh.  My.  God.  :3
• Selected - G.K. Chesterton
• Selected - W.H. Auden
• Selected - Edna St. Vincent Milay
• The First Four Books - Louise Gluck
• Haiku Anthology, ed. Cor Van Den Heuvel
• Kingfisher - Amy Clampitt (Another Oh, my poet.)
• Selected - Ezra Pound
• Spoon River Anthology - Edgar Lee Masters
• Poetical Works - Coleridge
• Complete Poems: 1927 - 1979 by Elizabeth Bishop
• Norton Critical: John Donne, ed. A.L. Clements (my dad introduced me to Donne as a moody teenager and, well, it stuck.);
• Selected - E.E. Cummings
• Poem: 1965 - 1975 (Death of a Naturalist, Door into the Dark, Wintering Out, North) - Seamus Heaney (another poet my dad introduced me to as a moody teenager.)
• Love Lyrics of Ancient Egypt, trans. Barbara Hughes Fowler (poems from the New Kingdom and the 18th, 19th and 20th dynasties.  I'm not an Egyptologist, I just like reading what dead people had to say about each other.)
• The Ring of Words: An Anthology of Song Texts, ed. Philip L. Miller (a collection of Continental art songs)
• Victorian Poetry: Clough to Kipling, ed. Arthur J. Carr
• The King's Henchman - Edna St. Vincent Milay
• Brumby's Run - A.B. Patterson
• Selected - Algernon Charles Swinburne
• Selected - Alfred Lord Tennyson
• The Ring and the Book - Robert Browning
• Very Bad Poetry, ed. Kathryn & Ross Petras (a collection of truly awful poetry written in sincerity.  Because without knowing bad poetry for what it is, how can we distinguish the worthy and good?  Or something.)
• The New Yorker Book of Poems (a humble collection of the more-than-slightly bombastic poems which have graced the pages of the New Yorker.)
• #154, the Poetry Issue by The Paris Review (a journal I've kept since I found it as a moody teen.  Some of it is a little stilted but there's real insight here.  But I guess I haven't read it in over ten years, so my opinion may have changed without knowing.)
• The Ghost of Eden - Chase Twichell (Very long ago, in what seems like another life, I was in a long-distance relationship and this is one of two books she sent me.  I haven't read it in years, I remember it being awful.)
• Notes From a Greasy Spoon - Jim Burns (a gift from a penpal :3
• Selected - Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine (eh.)
• The World's Wife - Carol Ann Duffy (a book from a class I never finished.  The professor and I decided we didn't like each other and that was that.)
• Poems, Ballads and Other Verses - Rudyard Kipling. (A 1909 printing, one of a thousand.  Not really a big deal, these things were easy to come by then.)
• Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry, ed. J.D. McClatchy
• The Poet's Tales: A Book of Story Poems (another volume I keep for SCA bardic circles.)
• The Oxford Book of American Poetry, ed, David Lehman
• The Oxford Book of American Verse, ed. F.O. Matthiessen

 

[Wren of the Brown]

Welp. This project is taking too long. I want to be packed out by the last week of July. This can wait.

[U4ea]

lol, you'll come back to it. It'll haunt your dreams....