LibraryThing

I am going to take a moment to discuss my new hobby by writing a completely unsolicited and gushing post. If you are a bibliophile, you might already be familiar with the site LibraryThing. I got reacquainted with the website recently through my work at the museum. One of my longterm (very longterm) projects is creating a digital catalogue of the staff library. The decision to use LibraryThing for that project led me to start my own library. The tagline “LibraryThing is an ocean” is true beyond my initial understanding of what you can do on the site.

For example, I love bizarre statistics that are in some way based in reality. My book stack is currently 86.2 feet tall (slightly higher than the Sphinx) and weighs 8,075 pounds. That is 0.03393 the weight of a blue whale. My library is about 60% male authors to 40% female with more alive authors than dead ones. History, classic literature, dystopian, fantasy, nonfiction, young adult and humor are the tags that come screaming out of my tag cloud.

I’ve gotten a few helper badges for adding to the common knowledge section of the site and adding in the locations of Little Free Libraries. I even joined the Early Reviewer program and received a copy of How to Make Your Baby and Internet Celebrity by Rick Chillot. Admittedly, it is not a book that I would have picked out on my own, but I enjoyed it. It is a quick, afternoon read that occasionally made me laugh out loud. I found the middle section to be the funniest, and I read portions aloud to Greg. In case it struck your interest, I recommend giving this book as a gift to any social media maven in your life who has or is expecting a little one. Just make sure that you get it to them before their kid is older than one and therefore useless for internet celebrity purposes.

Greg has fantasy football; I have LibraryThing. There is peace in the kingdom.