If there is one thing that I love it is organization, and the more anal and digital it is, the more I love it. Bring on Library Thing. It’s the perfect web based application for anyone with a decent book collection. I have been entering ISBN’s for a couple of days now and I am about one-fifth of the way through cataloguing my collection. Going through my books is such a trip down Memory Ln. of the phases of my life. The naive bohemian Kerouac days, the dirty Henry Miller days, the pomo days, the completist phase… And the realization that I have several copies of many of the same titles. I know that I used to buy books in paperback that I already owned in hardcover as to not fuck up the spine of the cloth cover. I have many first editions that I kept in pristine condition, until my roommates tried to put the xmas tree in the fire a few years ago and burned down the living room and charred the spines of most of my collection.

You can see my collection here. Library thing is free for up to 200 books, an unlimited membership costs $10/year or $25/lifetime, a small price to pay for an OCD outlet. You can also make a cool little widget that shows random books from your collection like I have down there in my sidebar. And it’s all linked up through Amazon Associates so click and buy some of the books in my collection because I need money.