Vintage/Victorious
In light of last week’s sudden burst of list activity, I should say that I have something of an obsession with lists: the categorizing, the planning, the whittling, the quibbling. Lovely.
And in the interest of linking as many times as possible, I should point out that it was Kathryn’s gender breakdown of her bookshelf and Marcus’s big/small publisher dichotomy that brought me to my own bookcases, notebook in hand, to look at the distribution of publishers therein.
Vintage decimated the competition, with 20.1%, which makes me wonder why the others bothered to show up. Penguin and Harper, the two next highest, only managed 8.9% and 6.1%, respectively.
Raw data below.
Methodology: 313 books total. I ignored my stacks of unread books, and omitted comics, which, when included, skewed the numbers toward DC, Fantagraphics, and Andrews & McMeel.
The two Rays, doing their part for Team Vintage
Vintage: 20.1% (63 books)
Penguin: 8.9% (28 books)
Harper: 6.1% (19 books)
Harcourt: 4.5% (14 books)
Grove
Scribner: 4.2% each (13 books)
Dell
Simon & Schuster: 3.8% each (12 books)
Bantam: 2.9% (9 books)
FSG: 2.6% (8 books)
Anchor
Ballantine
Houghton Mifflin
Knopf: 2.2% each (7 books)
Signet: 1.9% (6 books)
Fawcett: 1.6% (5 books)
Back Bay
Modern Library
Pocket
Warner: 1.3% each (4 books)
Avon
Dover
Schocken
Washington Square: 1.0% each (3 books)
Publishers represented by only two books: 5.8% (18 books)
Publishers represented by only one: 11.8% (37 books)
Conclusions? Well, I never was very good at lab reports. But certainly a bias toward fiction and paperbacks helps to explain these numbers. I will also say that the classic Vintage spine—the bars on the top and bottom, the blocky font—is a wonderful design. So is this marketing at work? Does Vintage just have a great catalog?
Or at this point, does the same conglomerate own all of these imprints, anyway?
The gender breakdown, by the way, is 31.3% women. Which isn’t great, but is better than I feared it would be.
Dan,
I love lists too.
Wikipedia, as flawed and sometimes inaccurate as it may be, is a variety of nirvana for lists. Especially their “lists of lists,” which can get me started reading for a long time. I’ll just start reading on one page and then bounce around to their external links and pretty soon it’s been two hours and I’ve got about a million tabs open and I’m reading about god knows what.
Anyway, hooray for the interwebs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Lists_of_lists
I read in an article that Susan Sontag judged people based on how their bookshelves were organized; chronological, of course, was the right way, as opposed to alphabetically. All this bookshelf data suggests infinitely more ways to organize. Maybe this says something about each of us? at this point, mine are organized by *chance* and many are in piles on the floor…
I’ve always wanted to try organizing by color but recognize that this would mean I’d never find anything.
A friend of mine does that because she read about it in a home design magazine. Her living room looks awesome, but she never knows where any books are. She also drives her husband crazy because the color sorting breaks up his sci-fi and fantasy series.
That was another problem, what to do with series, or even books by the same author. And what do you do if you can’t decide which color is primary on the spine? But I’ve seen it done and it does look quite pretty.
I organize by size, tallest to shortest, and make my shelves zig zag all the way down. I can’t ever find anything, unless I know if it is an especially tall or short book.
My shelves are broken down by type of book (novels, story collections, poetry, textbooks, memoirs, lit mags, etc) then alphabetically by author (or title for collections), and then chronologically. My CDs and records are organized the same way.
I obviously have problems.
No, no. This sounds exactly right.
By which I clearly mean that it sounds like my shelves.
I can’t honestly describe my shelves as organized. Yes, there are some related history books next to each other, but other than some obvious clustering, I think my shelves are mostly arranged in terms of the size of the book, meaning the last time I moved it made the most sense to pack books of a similar size together, and hence when I unpacked they ended up on the shelves next to each other. Surprisingly, I have a pretty good sense of where stuff is, but I thrive in chaotic environments.
Dan, you got me to be more conscious about book lists when you posted on FB the books, music, film you consumed last year. I’m a big fan of self-reflection (aren’t I just fascinating?) and less than two months into this year I find myself spending my time much more wisely because I have an active list of what I’ve been reading on a sheet of paper, which, I’m pretty sure, is sitting around here somewhere…
I can’t express how thrilled I am that someone has as much of Chandler’s work as I do. The guy’s really underappreciated.
I’m also making this my weekend project, partly because, like Melina, my bookshelves (and book tables and books chairs and book countertops) are arranged by chance, and it would be healthy to have them organized by something other than that. Also because I am always looking for ways to spend time that involve writing but don’t actually include it.
Anna was a librarian assistant for a while. Maybe she can break out the dewey decimal system and help.
I need to go back and look at my shelves again. After Kathryn’s blog I looked at gender but didn’t think about presses–brilliant idea!
[...] the last few week, on the behest of some fellow Bark bloggers, I’ve been prompted to stand in front of my bookshelf, to [...]