The truth is that most of us don't read much. But those of us who do tend to want to tell everyone how much we love it. How we read 85 books last year. How nothing beats snuggling up with a good book. How all you need is books. (Or maybe that's love. Or oxygen. Or maybe love is like oxygen, you get too much and you get too high, not enough and you're gonna die–as Sweet warned us in their 1978 song that has little to do with this discussion.)
Back to books, or more specifically, ownership of books. According to a survey by the folks at YouGov.com, 85% of Americans say they own at least one book (the physical kind, not one on an electronic device). The other 15% is made up of 9% who don't own a book and 6% who don't know (which means they don't own a book, right?).
Twenty-four percent of us own at least 100 books. And 7% of Americans own at least 1,000 books.
One-thousand!
The most interesting question in that survey wasn't even about how many books people owned. The best question (which dives deeply into how our brains work) is how we organize our books.
For starters, the obvious outcome: People who own 10 or fewer books don't really have an organizational method because they don't need one. That's true in the same way I don't organize my phones or thumbs. I have so few that they don't need organization (although I prefer to keep my thumbs on the opposite end of my hand from my little fingers).
People probably need to organize books when they get to 100 or so.
So think again: If you had 200 (or 800, 15,000) books, how would you organize them?
By title? Author? Color? Genre?
Well, according to the survey, the most common way for people with many books to organize their collection is by genre or subject matter (another word for genre, right?). That's by far the leading way: 37% of people with 100 or more books use that system. The next most common way for people with 100 or more books to organize is alphabetically by the author's name, which is tied with . . . by size.
Really? By size? That seems like something an 8-year-old would do, not something a 50-year-old would do. I apologize to 50-year-old readers who organize their books by size. If that's you, remember that the "Where's Waldo" books are big, so they go on the end.
There are other ways that a few people use: Alphabetically by title, by color, by another system (possibilities: Alphabetically by the first word on Page 8, by the attractiveness of the author, by the order they were acquired).
How we organize things is fascinating. If you don't think it's personalized, try going into someone's kitchen sometime and look at their spice rack. Or time travel to when people other than hipsters had record albums and look at their album collections. Where would you find the album by Sweet that had "Love is Like Oxygen" on it? Was it by genre (New Wave? Glam rock? Pop?)? Was it by the name of the band or album ("Level Headed" in this case)? Was it randomly?
Organization is so personalized that it's impossible to know what to expect from anyone, which is why the Dewey Decimal system, launched in 1876 and used in libraries is so brilliant.
Without the Dewey Decimal system you could go into a library and discover that the books are organized by whatever seemed right to the librarian: "Oh, you need 'Grapes of Wrath?' I think that's a paperback, so it's either in the green section or next to books that are the same size. Good luck."
Maybe we should organize books at our home by the Dewey Decimal system, too. Make it mandatory.
That would be sweet.
Like the band that performed "Love is Like Oxygen."
Reach Brad Stanhope at bradstanhope@outlook.com.
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