Sorting My Bookish Book Collection

Spent yesterday’s evening sorting the books about books I bought since moving to the Netherlands. It starts to look like an obsession. However, it’s hard to stop when you have book markets like the one in the Hague just a half-hour ride away.

Can you guess what’s in the highest heap? And in the other which are higher than the rest? =)

However, it may be not the most proper representation of the distribution of books in my collection. On the next photo, you’ll see an unsorted heap of tomes scheduled for scanning (they are already old enough to be public domain, out of copyright limitations.)

I’ll update this post with the answer to my question tomorrow =)

Updated on the 20th of October, 2018

So, here the answer to the riddle:

Let me also provide some explanation.

I decided to sort my books alphabetically because it seems to me it would be easier to find them with the help of my electronic catalog that way. We’ll see how it works.

As some had already guessed, some of the books in the highest stack are about bookbinding. But not all, and not only in that heap alone. However, as the word book translates into boek in Dutch and Buch in German, the stack of the letter B is at least twice as high as the second highest.

Next two are the stacks corresponding to the letters D and T. German articles das, die, der, and Dutch article de made one of these heaps so high, and English the decided the fate of the other. And the word typography =)

Letter F is represented so prominently only because I have an almost full archive of the Fine Print: The Review for the Arts of the Book magazine. Hope to make it even higher when I find the lacking issues.

Again, H and L were raised high mostly by the help of articles. French le, la, l’, and les as well as the Dutch het.

The last letter I would mention is P. Obviously, the word print is used often in the titles of these books.

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