Shelfishness

A recent Miss Manners column¹ discussed the “appalling”² practice of shelving books “backwards”, with the spines toward the wall. Despite the column begging the question of using books for decoration to begin with, I was pumping my fist – despite my default reaction to the stuffy old ‘rules’ of etiquette being a good ol’ Bert stare³, I’ll pick cherries like Pac-Man – as I read her excoriation of those who would shelve by color⁴, until I realized that:

1. She also derided shelving books based on height, which, well… look at fancy Miss “I Have So Much Wall Space I Don’t Need to Bother Using It Efficiently Or Else I Just Don’t Mind Having Hundreds of Boxes of Books Unshelved in Storage Or I Suppose More Likely Just Don’t Have That Many Books” Manners over here.
2. And, uh, I currently have books shelved fore-edge out, and can think of at least three (good!) reasons why one might do that…

1. ⁵ If you’ve got a to-be-read shelf, it’s a nice way to add in a little bit of day-to-day variety by not knowing exactly what you’re grabbing on your way out the door.
2. It avoids having to get into the literary equivalent of the whole “RTs ≠ endorsements” morass if someone catches a glimpse of your bookshelves when stopping by, in the background of an unexpected video call, etc.
3. If you’re in the “just-get-the-shelves-up-and-get-the-books-on-the-shelves-so-they’re-not-on-the-floor-you-can-finish-the-sorting-and-organizing-later” stage of shelving⁶, it’s an easy way to distinguish books that have been fully catalogued from those that have yet to be processed.⁷

1. While I do not peruse Ms. Manners, I do scan across it for certain keywords such as ‘dog’, ‘book’, etc . ↩︎
2. … because the letter writer was “appalled”, not because I quote the air to disagree. Because I don’t, except that I do, yes-but-actually-no-but-that’s-the-point-of-this-post. ↩︎
3. ↩︎
4. I of course admit the possibility of said books being part of a reference library of cover designs or bindings, or the library of a synaesthete whose mental loci are colors, or managed via an automated scanning & tracking system that allows for the near-instantaneous location of any volume via a pan-tilt laser pointer mounted in the middle of the ceiling, or being intentionally arranged in a non-logical manner so as to foster serendipitous adjacencies, etc. ↩︎
5. No, I’m not going to bother figuring out how to tidy up the formatting in WordPress’s editor. ↩︎
6. Coming up on the second decade of that, myself. ↩︎
7. The same applies, m.m., to stuff like Post-It flags in the margins for things to look up, write out, follow up on, etc. ↩︎

Huh. Would’ve kinda expected that WordPress would’ve treated footnotes… not the same as a numbered list with automatic anchors, apparently, but there ya go.

… which does make it annoying that I don’t seem to be able to footnote my footnotes, because I totally had something for that.