Pearls Before Swine by Stephan Pastis for March 25, 2023

A text book case of racism

I have to agree; everybody knows that books should be arranged by height.

Which also explains why she got fired from her job at the library.

you can’t judge a date by their covers…

At least she owns books.

Four identical panels. I organize mine by subject. I have a bookcase devoted to gardening.

Must be a reader with OCD

Let’s see, Sci-fi on the top shelf, computer books, philosophy books, with math and physics books on the bottom. Well, that’s the way it should be but… Not quite.

In the order they were in when you took them out of the boxes and stuffed them into the bookcase after you moved. I don’t bother with a system. I just remember roughly where each one is. Yes, I can remember the locations of a couple of hundred books. I can remember the locations of a few hundred books in the Barr-Smith library in 1967. I can remember the locations of a few books in the Stockholm public library when I popped in for about half an hour in 1975. I can’t remember what my wife asked me to get from the shops today.

https://d2p7wwv96gt4xt.cloudfront.net/G/86C2EEB0/EAN-9789112136814

My brother’s books are full of teeth marks.

“The Last Bookstore” in Los Angeles organizes some of the upstairs shelves like that.

That means she took off the dust covers, which is plain wrong. I think Reese Witherspoon said in her autobiography that she does that. It’s stupid and means you don’t care about what books you have. They just become decoration.

In grade school we had a multiple choice test on the library. For “How are books organized in the library?” the obviously wrong answer was, “By size and color.”

Don’t judge a lover by their book cover.

The main problem was that they were ebooks.

Pearl before Swine and Big Nate books on their very own shelves

What is a book?

Since I have run out of shelf space for my books, I just stuff them where I can at this point, order has nothing to do with it.

Comics by title and original issue #, Nero Wolfe mysteries by publishing date, WWII aviation by theater of operation and alphabetic by title, Auto racing by era, and WWI aviation by size and colour.

You gotta draw the line somewhere. /s

HA! Obsessive compulsive..

Some ‘chapter’ of autism?

That’s why “Print is dead” (Egon, Ghostbusters)

That’s an interesting idea actually. Think of the art you could create.

Books are disgusting. That’s one of the reasons I prefer e-books:

https://howtomurderpests.com/bugs-that-eat-books-paper/#:~:text=Why%20Books%20Attract%20Bugs%3F%201%20The%20paper%20contains,in%20your%20home%20before%20they%20infested%20your%20books

She’s just a cover-lover.

The color of the hard cover or the dust jacket?

OK, who does that? At the very least, sort them alphabetically by title or author or something.

If nothing else, it probably looks satisfying.

I arrange mine by author, and then series within the author, if applicable.

I organize mine by number of pages.

Books should be arranged by the price paid. Use a storage tub for garage sale books.

If she organizes her books she’s ahead of me.

Word Salad Harris arranges hers by the ones she hasn’t finished coloring in.

With adjustable bookshelves, that can sometimes be tricky.

I organize by author or genre. I actually don’t hold on to many books anymore. I either give to Goodwill or take them to a used book store

With or without dust covers?

I use the Dewey Decimal System (I have an MLS degree, though I am not and have never been a librarian) except for my science fiction collection, which is separated out due to its size. Otherwise, it would rather overwhelm the 800s.

Book lovers know where each and every book is on their shelves- it doesn’t matter how we organize them.

At least she didn’t go Ray Bradbury on those books.

Relationships are for chumps, anyways.

What’s so bad about organizing books by their cover color?

What happens with the multicolored ones?

Genre and alphabetical. Maybe I’m OCD, but that’s how I like it (Plus…I don’t have that many books).

Long books won’t fit the shelf.

But then she eats the book…

I’m with Goat on this one. Breakuppable offense!

Color organization would be a challenge. Going from left to right and down would be messy. Worse if you have more than one bookcase (and who does not have more than one bookcase?). I think that an ombre accross all shelves, Black to violet on top through the rainbow to red on the bottom.

Makes more sense than the Dewey Decimal System.

I guess that Dewey didn’t know about the Roy G. Biv system (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet).

Maybe Billy Goat is too horny.

Eight bookshelves of books on ancient Egypt, all piled to the ceiling. A lot are elephant folios = 24" tall, so they don’t fit on the shelves and have to be stacked in front of a bookcase.

I have faced the fact that I will never be able to move.

This has been a hilarious conversation!! Who would’ve thought the idea of how one sorts his books on a shelf would generate all this. I don’t imagine Pastis will even bother reading this stuff!

I put mine wherever I dogammed feel like!

Just because someone’s a book lover, it doesn’t mean they actually read them.

What color scheme did she use, RGB or CMY?

I do a combo deal of height and genre

I’ve got to come up with a system for my physical books.

Arranging by thickness is the only correct way.

Picky, picky.

I arrange mine by odor.

I’ve noticed that only Goat and Pig regularly date females, (I’m counting Pigita) I don’t want Rat to have anything to do with females, I’m afraid he might reproduce.

I actually do something similar to this very day. My music CD collection is separated by genre (alphabetically). Then, within each genre, alphabetized by artist. THEN, within each artist, arranged by release date.

My wife was always posing my books around the house to look fashionable. Now they’re on shelves here gathered by topics as I prefer.

Horrors! By color? How unthinking. I arrange mine by height….

Mr and Mrs Harwell in the British mystery novel “Thrones, Dominations” live in an apartment that’s pretty much a hotel. “The management even keep the cocktail cabinet fully stocked for us; we don’t have a large one, of course, just a very neat design in walnut with a built-in wireless set and a little shelf for books.” The people to whom they explain this convenience live differently. (It’s not mentioned whether the management supply the books. I can imagine it.)

Chapter one is given here.https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/first/s/sayers-thrones.html

I wonder about people who are interviewed on tv sitting in front of a lot of books. If it isn’t your home, who’s library are you at?

Former librarian here – yes, it is true – the Color Wheel has replaced the Dewey Decimal system as the book classification tool in many libraries…

But, if you put the big ones at the end of each row, you can save yourself the price of bookends.

I arrange my books by weight-per-page.