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Tuesday, October 03, 2006

Feelin' A Bit Cocky

I'm not sure to what extent I've talked about LibraryThing.com since I joined it last April. It doesn't really matter. Suffice it to say, I've got most of our family's books logged into this online library cataloguing forum. Excluded are kids' board and picture books, and cookbooks; included are old text books, Bibles, and kids' "chapter books".

I discovered LibraryThing while googling for book-cataloguing software. For $25 I have a lifetime membership to LibraryThing, and I also have the enjoyment of knowing that my bibliophile-ness is not unique to the universe. I have had delightful, diversionary conversations with book-nuts in random places like Juneau, North Carolina and England.

However, I had been feeling a bit gloomy about the fact that six months of cataloguing books has yielded a library of (as of this very moment) only 2,273 titles.

Compare my 2,273 books to the LARGEST library catalogued on LibraryThing, belonging to "bluetyson", which has 12,403. I mean, wow.

LibraryThing now has 90,497 members. Of those members, I have the 220th largest library. That's the top 2.5%. Yeah for me.

This puts it all in a more positive light.

I only purchased eight new books in the past week. Seven of them were for $2 total from Salvation Army on Northern Light Boulevard, here in Anchorage.

Our city has several Salvation Army Thrift Store locations, but the one on Northern Lights is my favorite. Its a bit further from home, has a slightly more "questionable" clientele, but when I take a pile of books up to the register, rather than itemizing them (i.e. $1 for a hardback, .50 cents for a paperback) they casually eyeball my pile and throw out a figure 75% or more lower than what they might otherwise charge (had they bothered to itemize). I'm not sure this is a "store policy" but three different cashiers have done the exact same thing.

You can't imagine how quivery-happy this makes me.

Plus, the inventory at this particular store is much better than the other Salvation Army stores. It is the best book-deal I've yet found in Anchorage (including the annual library book sale, which is 50% off on the Sunday of their twice-yearly "book-sale weekend").

Speaking of which - the next library book-sale is the first weekend in November. I'm torn between joy and angst: the joy of getting new books and the angst of spending money on books that I will not read any time soon, and that I no longer have any room for.

Maybe the 100 new books I anticipate buying from the library sale (figures based on past-library-sale-purchase-results) will put me somewhere in the top 1.8th percentile in LibraryThing.com.

One can only hope.

2 Comments:

At 10:58 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

She lives and writes! Good to see a post that is at least within the last month ;-) Miss you as always-K

 
At 2:44 PM, Blogger Gateway School and Learning Center said...

So now I know the REAL reason you can't go to the women's retreat. . .

 

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