After many grueling hours, I now have my books and DVDs sorted into (admittedly eccentric) categories on the bookshelves, in the various places the movers put the shelves. This task creates a series of insoluble puzzles in categorization, which I have been inclined to solve in an assortment of ad hoc ways.
There’s one giant category of linguistic structure, covering phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, arranged (in a desperate faute de mieux move) alphabetically by author — which is truly not useful, but resists breakup because so many of my interests cut across subareas. Similarly for a giant agglomeration of public-intellectual books, many (but not all) touching on matters of language; this is where you’ll find Geoff Nunberg, Arika Okrent, Steve Pinker, and Ben Yagoda.
Then there are more specialized topic collections: your library probably doesn’t have a subcollection on male prostitution or comics studies, but mine does. I’ve done less breaking down of the DVDs, because there aren’t a great many of them, but that has led to some surprising neighbors — as with the sequence of Marx Brothers movies, then My Neighbor Totoro, and then The Night of the Hunter.
But at least if it’s survived to get here, it’s on the shelves. Somewhere.
