I Thing I Love You

By David Abrams

Illustration by D.G. Strong

As of 2:23 on the afternoon I am writing this, my home library consists of exactly 4,530 books. Of those, 387 were first published in the 1980s, 650 were written between 1900 and 1949, and 245 come from the 19th century. I own four Hardy Boys mysteries, 32 featuring Hercule Poirot and six with Nero Wolfe. Out of the 4,530 volumes on my shelf, I have assigned them to one or more categories, including short story collections (467 books), westerns (180), biographies (123), and books about Alaska (65), Hollywood (66), the Iraq War (24), the Vietnam War (17) and Christmas (13).

I know all this and can report it to you with full authority because in just five clicks of the mouse, I have visited my profile at LibraryThing, a site I first joined in April 2006 and which, like the best of most-useful sites, has grown like a virus in my life ever since. Not a day goes by when I don't log on and gaze with pride, love and reverence at my online catalog of books.

Sure, I can swivel around in my chair and look at the real things — the dust-gatherers with their multi-colored spines forming a little cityscape profile on my shelves — but to have them all clustered so scientifically on my computer screen — ah! that is a miracle unto itself. In short, it is the answer to the prayer I wasn't even aware I was praying. If LibraryThing is cocaine, then I am a crack whore.

The site was founded in August 2005 by Tim Spalding, an enthusiastic fellow who once studied Greek and Latin at the University of Michigan and later worked for Houghton Mifflin. On the website, Tim tells us he started LibraryThing as "a pet project" to catalog his own collection, but soon it had "exploded" into something much more viral. We heard the same kind of thing from that guy who started eBay as a place to help his girlfriend trade her Pez dispensers.

The site is obscenely easy to use. Once you join and log in, you click on the "add books" tab, then type in part or all of a book title and its author's name. The site's client-server protocol goes out and retrieves information from Amazon, the Library of Congress and more than 80 other libraries to give you a list of matching titles. Click on the one that best matches your book and, congratulations, you have just entered the first book in your catalog. At this point, you will probably want to start searching the site for the toll-free number to assist you with the 12-Step Recovery Program.

Each book's page allows you to enter personalized information like tags (Alaska, Iraq War, Novels With Talking Penguins, etc.), a star rating, a review, a BookCrossing ID number, date you acquired the book, date you started to read the book, date you finished reading the book, date you threw the book across the room in disgust (just kidding) and a nifty little "comments" box in which I like to record where and under what circumstances I first got the book. ("Christmas gift from Jean" or "Purchased at Barnes & Noble in Ellicott City, Maryland — paid for it at the Cafe counter, which explains the Gingerbread Latte stain on pages 79-125.")

On your main library page, you can sort your collection according to title, author, rating, date published, date acquired, date read and how many other LibraryThingians have a particular book in their collection. (The Da Vinci Code is my most-shared book at the moment, followed by 1984 and Pride and Prejudice; if I owned any of the first six Harry Potter books — which I don't — they would trump poor Dan Brown). My profile page tells me the average publication date of my books (1971), my rate of tags per book (1.28) and the average number of stars I've given to the books I've rated (4 out of 5 — and, yes, I generally love most things I read).

The site also keeps a running tally of how many books I enter in any given month. Excluding the first months of orgiastic, late-night cataloging sessions, my best month's tally was October 2006 (131 new books); the worst was February 2007 (a paltry nine new books). I should add that, as a book reviewer, I have little control over how many new books I receive: each week, I am (happily) besieged by publishers sending me copies of new books to read. I currently have a gentleman's bet with myself to see if this current month (April, with 47 books) will beat last month (March, with 48 books). There is a lot riding on this, emotionally and economically, and I find myself rushing home each day to see if my good friends at UPS, USPS or FedEx have delivered any Jiffy-Pak envelopes pregnant with new books.

I've joined other book-cataloging sites, and I've half-heartedly entered some books into their databases, but frankly they just don't compare to what I find at LibraryThing. Maybe, like my marriage, I'm religiously devoted to the first one that came along, but I haven't found anything else that scratches my book itch like LibraryThing does.

I know my voice takes on something of a manic pitch when I start proselytizing about LibraryThing and, sure, I probably come off sounding like a car salesman at times — "check under the hood on this baby ... have you ever heard a database purr like that?" — but like Lucy hawking Vitameatavegamin, I'm a little drunk on the results.

I haven't even touched on the social aspects of the website. LibraryThing has been called "the Facebook for book lovers" — and while it's only a secondary consideration for me, the connection with others like me is revelatory at best and mildly disturbing at worst. LibraryThing automatically searches among its members to compare collections. For instance, I have 909 books in common with a 37-year-old homemaker in Anchorage who goes by the handle "alaskabookworm." If I still lived in the Last Frontier, maybe we'd get together for coffee at Title Wave Books and talk about our mutual love for Absalom, Absalom! Or maybe not; it would depend on the weather and the mood my wife is in, I suppose.

Dedicated LibraryThing members with way too much time on their hands have recently begun cataloging collections of Famous Dead People such as Ernest Hemingway, John Adams, Marie Antoinette and Tupac Shakur. Of all the gee-whiz features on the site, this is probably the gee-whizziest and has brought me closer than ever to my literary forebears. I mean, how else would I know that Papa H. and I both owned Tallulah Bankhead's autobiography?

By the way, Tupac and I share 11 books and I like to think he loved The Catcher in the Rye as much as I did. And if he were still alive, I wonder if, like me, he would think this site, with all of its statistics, computations and bibliophilic whirlygigs, was a thing of beauty.

—David Abrams reviews books for The Barnes & Noble Review, San Francisco Chronicle and January Magazine. His stories, essays and interviews have appeared in Esquire, Glimmer Train Stories, The Greensboro Review and elsewhere. He's currently reading Human Smoke, by Nicholson Baker, and is reeling from the experience.

Comments

[ssuerose]

I love this piece and may even be inspired to document my "collection" at LibraryThing, which I've visited a couple times. I am constitutionally disinclined toward list making and book rating (like best of the year), and I'm still not sure I know what qualifies for "best." I only know what I love, warts and all. Still, it would be nice to have a sense of what I have and what I have read, a kind of picture of my reading self.

Thank you, David.

[MiriamU]

I adore Library Thing too, even though I've only listed 200 some of my books and will never (ever) have over 4000 books to catalogue. The pleasure of ordering my books with tags, making sure that they display the same cover as the book that's in my collection, of tracking what I've read (something I never could quite manage before Library Thing), and seeing what others are reading is surprisingly intense.

I've even started occasionally reviewing books I've read, and adding a comment or two here and there in the group discussions.

[Karen Templer]

I'd love to be able to click and see all my books lined up and tagged like that. If only someone would enter them all for me ...

Maybe somebody could make a job of that. Charge an hourly rate.

[Tramp Louie]

HA!

Very nicely done, David.

But I'm laughing because just this very weekend I was tinkering around with a lead-in for the Odd Odd Shelf I'm starting to play around with putting together, and it turned into a longer essay about the madness (I even used a virus as a metaphor...right after I used Godzilla) of the feeling of the need to organize and categorize and tag every last aspect of our lives with a label and sublabel and subsublabel, including books, referring to everything from Judge Holden's infamous ledger (Blood Meridian) to marxist theory, tentatively entitled, "LibraryThing Must Die!"

[ana purna]

Wonderful, David.

I didn't know about LibraryThing until recently and have just created an account. Oh my! The night I logged my first few books, I had a feeling that was similar to the feeling I had the few times I played the slots in Vegas. A sort of itchy, compulsive feeling. I'm not sure this is a good thing (in fact, it's the reason I don't gamble), but I know I'll return. After all, LibraryThing won't get me into the same kind of trouble as gambling. (I hope.)

[lynn c]

The thought of scanning the ISBN numbers of all my books is daunting - I have thousands of books. I know the scanner offered on Library Thing is $15, but I think you have to bring the book to the computer, right? Is there such a thing as a (reasonably) cheap scanner, that is more portable?

[DavidAbrams]

For those of you keeping score at home, I'm happy to report that I won the bet with myself: April beat March. In the bottom of the ninth, the Fourth Month squeaked by with three new books today, beating the home team 51-48. With the money I made from this wager, I think I'll buy myself a book.

[Karen Templer]

Ha -- congratulations!

[Penny Marshall]

I am entranced by LibraryThing! I love the series feature and have had fun sorting out authors like John Creasey. The new covers are fabulous and I am going through my entire collection changing covers - all my Canadian books without original covers get the beautiful maple leaf cover. I love books and this adds another dimension to that.

[Karen Templer]

There are notes up today about the Dead People's Libraries bit on Critical Mass and something new to me, Very Short List.

[Karen Templer]

Hi, Penny. You've just given me a reason to want to sign up -- online I could have all of my books with the covers I WISH they had instead of being stuck with an ugly edition here and there.