Books sorted

We have sorted all our hardcovers alphabetically, except for some of the oversized books (which need to sit on separate shelves)!

It took a while, and the first stages felt very slow; by the end, I felt as though I was zooming through the last few letters, because we had already done most of the work. (We sorted each bookcase alphabetically by author first, then started on the process of getting all the A's on the top of the first bookcase, and so on; somewhere along the way, I started filling from both ends, with Zelazny, Yolen, and some of the W's on the last bookcase.

This feels like a significant accomplishment, in part because we'd given up on alphabetizing the books in the old apartment. The key difference is that we did some culling as we unpacked, and bought two more bookcases; having enough room means that we weren't looking at the train-wreck of "here are the neatly alphabetized authors through about R, good luck with the piles if you want anything from the rest of the alphabet."

The paperbacks are a project for another week, or month, but I feel greatly accomplished, and there's some practical value in being able to find a significant number of our books. We also turned up a few duplicates in the literally the same edition direction: e.g., we own exactly one Ron Goulart collection, but had two copies of it. And two copies of the same edition of Maeterlinck's The Life of the Bee.

As a side note, having had the energy to do most of this suggests to me that I am basically recovered from being sick for most of February and the beginning of March. (cattitude started the bookcase-by-bookcase sort while I was out of town. I did the rest of those and then started combining the bookcases; I assumed he'd join in, but I finished before he had the chance.)

I should make some plans to see people, now that I don't expect to have to cancel for health reasons.