The trial of my life... My Bookshelf
Warning: post may be of interest to librarians, archivists and extreme bibliophiles only. And even then....
So I am wondering.... How in the heck am I to catalog a book like Beasts!
Perhaps this is a ridiculous thing to obsess over, but I take this sort of thing (i.e. organizing my personal papers and book collection) pretty seriously. I spend all day organizing the papers of other people and organizations that I wonder... When I die after being rich and famous and someone needs to organize my papers, what sort of state will they be in? Actually, no, I don't have nearly that inflated sense of self legacy (yet). Frankly, this is just the way my brain works. Besides, I admire fellows like Thomas Jefferson and apparently he took this shit seriously too.
So Beasts!... The reason I know about this book is through my monitoring of happenings within the comic book community. The book is filled with art by various comic book, comic strip, and graphic novel artists who each took one cryptozoological creature and provided an illustration for it (with some pretty fantastic results). I even bought the book at my Local Comic Shop. So I'm fairly compelled to include it with my other comics, collected editions, and graphic novels. That said... I just don't feel comfortable putting it there. There's no narrative here, no panels... It's published by Fantagraphics, but it just doesn't cut it as a comic book. So let's take it as a book on Cryptozoology, since really that's what it is. More specifically, and especially since it is set up in an entry style manner, I'd put it under Crytozoology-Encyclopedias or even Crytozoology-Handbooks, manuals, etc (all LCSH's). But then would I put it with reference books? Or books specifically on animals? NYU has a couple books classified under these LCSHs, so I thought I'd browse the shelf to see what sort of books reside alongside them. What caught my eye on this shelf were terms like "beastly folklore" and "animal lore in English literature." In the end, Beasts! will find its way onto my shelf within the general area of literature, but particularly next to my books on Italian folklore and the tales of the Brothers Grimm.
Beasts! is just an example. Most books are pretty easy to place into my intellectual organization, but every now and then something like this comes along that I find particularly hard to place and... I enjoy it. I actually have more fun the more troubling it is to fit a book into my idea of how the intellectual world is organized (and I'll probably have similar, and actually more difficult problems with Borges's Book of Imaginary Beings). In the days when I was simply juggling a couple part time jobs (and actually had MUCH more free time on my hands than I do now in my graduate-student career) I used to re-organize my entire bookshelf whenever I got bored. Most people probably find this insanely pointless and even boring. But I'm sure at the same time there's a subset within those people who completely sympathized with the main character of High Fidelity constantly re-organizing his musical collection, particularly when he decided to do so "autobiographically."
It is no only what we collect which expresses who we are, but how we decide to organize, keep, and portray it. There are debates over whether this is important (believe it or not). One such debate goes on over Yoshio Kishi's archives of the Yellow Peril. This one filmmaker decided to accumulate documents, art, and ephemera related to the demonizing of Asians in America. To some it's enough that all this material is collected and displayed. The collection can be broken up, cataloged according to the standards of whatever repository it winds up in and, if possible, cross referenced as having come from the Kishi collection. To others, however, the very organization of this material is important. In other words, how it is grouped and set up is an expression of the collector himself. For those that subscribe to this philosophy of collecting as art and expression, to break up the organization of this material that Kishi himself has imposed would be a violence against both Kishi's expression and the collection itself.
As I've already said above, to some people this sort of philosophical agony over the organization of books or collected materials is completely asinine. But perhaps, without being fully conscious of it, you've projected your intellect or personality onto a collection of your own. If you're a collector of any sort, be it music, books, or even Hummel figurines, take a look at how your collection is organized and wonder for a moment, Why did I do things that way, after all?
So I am wondering.... How in the heck am I to catalog a book like Beasts!
Perhaps this is a ridiculous thing to obsess over, but I take this sort of thing (i.e. organizing my personal papers and book collection) pretty seriously. I spend all day organizing the papers of other people and organizations that I wonder... When I die after being rich and famous and someone needs to organize my papers, what sort of state will they be in? Actually, no, I don't have nearly that inflated sense of self legacy (yet). Frankly, this is just the way my brain works. Besides, I admire fellows like Thomas Jefferson and apparently he took this shit seriously too.
So Beasts!... The reason I know about this book is through my monitoring of happenings within the comic book community. The book is filled with art by various comic book, comic strip, and graphic novel artists who each took one cryptozoological creature and provided an illustration for it (with some pretty fantastic results). I even bought the book at my Local Comic Shop. So I'm fairly compelled to include it with my other comics, collected editions, and graphic novels. That said... I just don't feel comfortable putting it there. There's no narrative here, no panels... It's published by Fantagraphics, but it just doesn't cut it as a comic book. So let's take it as a book on Cryptozoology, since really that's what it is. More specifically, and especially since it is set up in an entry style manner, I'd put it under Crytozoology-Encyclopedias or even Crytozoology-Handbooks, manuals, etc (all LCSH's). But then would I put it with reference books? Or books specifically on animals? NYU has a couple books classified under these LCSHs, so I thought I'd browse the shelf to see what sort of books reside alongside them. What caught my eye on this shelf were terms like "beastly folklore" and "animal lore in English literature." In the end, Beasts! will find its way onto my shelf within the general area of literature, but particularly next to my books on Italian folklore and the tales of the Brothers Grimm.
Beasts! is just an example. Most books are pretty easy to place into my intellectual organization, but every now and then something like this comes along that I find particularly hard to place and... I enjoy it. I actually have more fun the more troubling it is to fit a book into my idea of how the intellectual world is organized (and I'll probably have similar, and actually more difficult problems with Borges's Book of Imaginary Beings). In the days when I was simply juggling a couple part time jobs (and actually had MUCH more free time on my hands than I do now in my graduate-student career) I used to re-organize my entire bookshelf whenever I got bored. Most people probably find this insanely pointless and even boring. But I'm sure at the same time there's a subset within those people who completely sympathized with the main character of High Fidelity constantly re-organizing his musical collection, particularly when he decided to do so "autobiographically."
It is no only what we collect which expresses who we are, but how we decide to organize, keep, and portray it. There are debates over whether this is important (believe it or not). One such debate goes on over Yoshio Kishi's archives of the Yellow Peril. This one filmmaker decided to accumulate documents, art, and ephemera related to the demonizing of Asians in America. To some it's enough that all this material is collected and displayed. The collection can be broken up, cataloged according to the standards of whatever repository it winds up in and, if possible, cross referenced as having come from the Kishi collection. To others, however, the very organization of this material is important. In other words, how it is grouped and set up is an expression of the collector himself. For those that subscribe to this philosophy of collecting as art and expression, to break up the organization of this material that Kishi himself has imposed would be a violence against both Kishi's expression and the collection itself.
As I've already said above, to some people this sort of philosophical agony over the organization of books or collected materials is completely asinine. But perhaps, without being fully conscious of it, you've projected your intellect or personality onto a collection of your own. If you're a collector of any sort, be it music, books, or even Hummel figurines, take a look at how your collection is organized and wonder for a moment, Why did I do things that way, after all?