If the great library has 26 floors above ground for published works, and 26 sublevels for unpublished ones--on level for each letter of the alphabet--where do the numerically titled books go? Is "1984" filed under "N" for "Nineteen"? Or is there a numerical annex?

Just wondering!

Where I work (at Virgin Megastores) we file all the numerical artists and song titles like that, yes. So 1984 would be under 'n'.

However, I was under the impression that in the great library it was the surname of the author that determined which floor the book was on, so the numerical title wouldn't be a problem.



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There's a hole in my creativity bucket and it's all leaked out.

that's why "Nursery Crime" is located on the 6th floor... F is for Fforde :)

And why 'Great Expectations' is on the 4th.

(Of course, AAC actually means the 6th floor down, since Nursery Crime is unpublished).

yeah, that's it... ;-)

Oh, duh! How'd I miss that?? (grin)

Back when I had a part-time job at my local library, in my late teens, there was one book that always got left on the 'Returned Books' trolley rather than shelved by any of the staff: It was an old Regency romance that had been written "by a Lady"... I wonder how the Great Library would file that one? Would they put it under the author's real name, even though this didn't appear on the cover, or what? For that matter, how do they handle pen-names? (E.g. are the 'Alice' books filed under 'Lewis Carroll' or 'Charles Dodgson'?)


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"Don't wake the sleepers."

I don't know about the Great Library, but in the past, libraries filed books by the author's real name (i.e. Mark Twain was filed under Samuel Clemens) but now we file by whatever is on the title page and use an added entry for the real name.

I know this quite well because the library I work in is rather, erm, antiquated and there are lots of odd things lurking about the shelves.

Fforumites? Grammasites? ;-)



Post Edited (02-06-04 14:21)

Haven't run across any of those (yet), but I did find a lizard once. He was probably eating the cockroaches and black widows ....

Surely with being able to jump from text to text, the filing system isn't as important as the links between texts.

It doesn't matter whether a book can be jumped to vis the intiioal letter, if there;sma shorter route to it, surely?



PSD

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This is the work of an Italian narco-anarchic collective. Don't bother insulting them, they can't read English anyway.

Text to text jumping is all fine and well, but in the real world, it is still in its infancy. A 1,024 processor thinking machine can do this with amazing speed on many terabytes of books, but alas, very few are deployed to do anything of the sort. In the real world, the filing system is the only backup, and is too often essential. My impression is that libraries all over the world now spell out any numbers (in whatever language) in order to aphabetize.

I'd say that being the literary-minded characters they are, they probably have both the author's real name and psuedenym, and have a dummy copy at one with a reference to the other.

As the the 'by a Lady' book, they Great Library would, I assume, know her real name and file it under that. After all, they know the names of the authors of the vague ideas in the Well, and I can't imagine that all authors put their names on those (I certainly don't until I've finished it!)



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There's a hole in my creativity bucket and it's all leaked out.

Good point.


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Logic is like Fire, a good servant but a bad master.