Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Tuesday Thingers: Most Unpopular

For this week's Tuesday Thingers topic, Marie at The Boston Bibliophile asks:

Last week I asked what was the most popular book in your library- this week I'm going to ask about the most unpopular books you own. Do you have any unique books in your library- books only you have on LT? How many? Did you find cataloging information on your unique books, or did you hand-enter them? Do they fall into a particular category or categories, or are they a mix of different things? Have you ever looked at the "You and none other" feature on your statistics page, which shows books owned by only you and one other user? Ever made an LT friend by seeing what you share with only one other user?

Well, it looks like I have 68 "unique" books in my library, but I think that number is probably distorted a bit by a number of things. Cataloguing quirks might have something to do with it, and possibly differences in editions. For instance, I'm pretty sure there must be at least a few other LTers who own the Great Books editions of Shakespeare's plays and sonnets – so I may have entered the data differently.

Also, a lot of the unique titles are my husband's literary criticism books. And some others date from the days when we used to edit a poetry journal. I'm sure we must have entered the data by hand, since most of these works are pretty obscure and some are too old to have ISBNs.

Surprisingly, I have looked at the "You and none other" feature before, but not recently. There are twelve titles listed there – again, mostly lit crit and poetry.

We still have a lot more books to catalogue, but that's the answer for now.

4 comments:

  1. Yeah, I am sure I would have a lot more if I actually entered all the books I have into my LT Library.

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  2. Yeah I think a couple of mine are due to the way they were entered, and should be combined. Lol if only I had the time to go through and do so.

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  3. I know a couple of my zines that look unique are shared with at least one person but I couldn't copy the record over for some reason so it looks like my copy is unique when it's not. Oh well! :-)

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  4. Most of my unique books seems to be small press or self-published books. It's been interesting to read the other responses to this question. LTers mostly were similar with our responses last week, but this week we can't help but all be different.

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