S. bought me a lifetime membership to LibraryThing and I found that scanning books into a web database is the perfect distraction from sleep at 2:00 in the morning on a work night. Whenever I had a few minutes I would pull a cubby off the shelf and scan maybe a dozen books at a time. It took a few weeks like this, but soon enough I had the entire collection in.

Now if only LibraryThing had a tool to run off Dewey decimal number labels.

Here is my collection. It presently stands at 800 volumes. I dread having to move out of my basement apartment. The new place will undoubtedly be a third-floor walk-up and a studio to boot.

If any reader with a particularly large collection decides to catalog their books too, I highly recommend the CueCat barcode scanner. It’s cheep, ships quickly and turned a job that could have taken months into one that was only like two weeks of a few minutes each night.

Anyway, here’s a picture with most of the back side of the bookshelf to the right still stacked around my PC. It’s also the station where one third of the magic here at This Is Not A Dinner Party happens.