Since I had heard such good things about it, and since it seemed everyone was using it (well, everyone book-fixated and afflicted with OCD), I yielded to the temptation to create an account on Librarything. So instead of reading, playing Eve, and generally having normal fun last night, I spent a couple of hours making a start on cataloguing my books, using the highly scientific method of starting at the nearest shelf and doing them an armful at a time.
456 books later, I have completed five of the twenty-three shelves in the living room. That only leaves the books in the study, the bedroom, and, erm, the other half, currently in boxes for lack of space. Well, sort of in boxes, since I am always thinking "if only I had that book; no other will do", and emptying container after container to get to the required tome, finding three others in the process that I also must read again now I remember them. I have no idea what the total will be: those in the living room are maybe about forty percent of the total, but that is the wildest of guesses.
You can see the start of my collection here, and my sparse profile here. And the pride of my collection of first editions is already entered here. The author would have been disgusted at my pride and love of wordly things.
On the downside, the blog widgets don't work with my software. On the upside, that means that I have an excuse to tinker with the C# in the code-behind pages.
Update:
What I am finding most difficult is choosing which tags to apply to which books. It may seem obvious that Arthur C. Clarke's Fountains of Paradise should be tagged as science fiction, for instance. But what about Lucretius's On The Nature of the Universe? I tagged it as poetry, but it is clearly about physics (or at least natural philosophy), even if almost everything in it is nothing to do with real physics. Do I want it turning up when I look for books on physics? Luckily, several tags can be used. But the hard cases all seem to end up in a spiralling flight of epistemological wondering.
And who am I tagging for? Is it for others to see what I rate highly in shared interests? That was a thought, but I decided, instead, that my tags would be purely personal and selfish. So I ended up tagging much of my classical Greek collection (such as as Euripides, Sophocles and the like) as both drama and history, since one of its main reasons for being in my library is as a primary historical source. Similarly, the Illiad is tagged as both poetry and drama (since I believe it was intended for public performance) and the Symposium as philosophy, history (again, as a source for me) and drama (it is actually a really good play, if you read it).
Finally, books about subjects share that subject's tag in my scheme. So books about reading Greek tragedy share a drama tag with the sources.
My scheme is terribly inconsistent, but so are those of most bookshops. I have a vague cut-off for calling things like drama "history" as well, and it is not at the beginning of the modern period, for instance. It ceases where I no longer use a work for historical purposes. So the divine comedy is poetry, not "poetry, history". The cut-off seems to be mid-Byzantine, in practise. Justinian's Digest of Roman Law gets history and law tags, but move it forward to the 10th century and I might just call it law.