Even within an English degree its easy enough to chart a tight course and land where you prefer.

Yep! I was able to avoid most American Lit and tried to avoid as much poetry as possible, but couldn't in the Elizabethan and Victorian lit classes.

Kind of weird that Daughter of Time is shelved with Red Harvest

Seriously? I keep my copy of Daughter of Time with my (few) mysteries, next to my copy of Colin Dexter's The Wench Is Dead, a neat follow-up to DoT.

Even within an English degree its easy enough to chart a tight course and land where you prefer.

True. I mostly studied plays, which are limited by the tolerances of the audience's tushes.

Kind of weird that Daughter of Time is shelved with Red Harvest but then science fiction and fantasy are conflated in odd ways.

If you think about it, organizing fiction by genre is a bit like organizing an art gallery based on color. It can be done, obviously, and at least that way you have a hope of finding something you're looking for, but it's so arbitrary that it doesn't really tell you anything useful about an individual items.

but it's so arbitrary that it doesn't really tell you anything useful about an individual items.

True dat. I think most Elmore Leonard fans would enjoy Neuromancer (which Gibson modeled on Leonard's plots), so it even defeats the marketing angle.

I actually do prefer shelving everything together. It's a pain trying to figure out whether they're shelving Iain Banks in Fiction or Science Fiction.

The reason we went with an alphabetical format in our Lost in the Grooves book was to purposefully arrange records next to each other from a variety of genres.

It's a pain trying to figure out whether they're shelving Iain Banks in Fiction or Science Fiction.

His SciFi books usually come under Iain M Banks.

His SciFi books usually come under Iain M Banks.

Right and some bookstores shelve them separately. But some don't!

I've know both kinds of academics, the hard-core "genre is crap" and the voracious "OMG BOOKS" kind.

Guess which kind I am?

I like all of it; light reading, and then getting into a book on the word level and really parsing it out. I remember distinctly my first courses in college with a really fabulous professor, really getting into the meat of some texts and despairing, "OMG, I will NEVER be able to do this" and then, of course, I was.

I remember doing a paper on Antony and Cleopatra (titled "Hips, Lips, Tits, Power: The Feminization of Antony" -- god, I loved that title and my prof cackled over it for ages -- he was this fab Shakespeare scholar with this broad-ass W. Va accent who loooooved talking about all the "booowdy" stuff in Shakespeare) and when I was consulting with the prof and telling him my idea, he just reached out and pulled a shit load of stuff of his shelves - "You need this, and that, and oh, this..." and I was all "How do you just KNOW this stuff?"

And then 15 years later, as I was doing pretty much the exact same thing for a student, and they had the exact same reaction, I felt a thrill.

But I knew English people who were all snobby and shit about anything that wasn't their area, and I just felt bad for them. All those books! All those stories!

I actually do prefer shelving everything together. It's a pain trying to figure out whether they're shelving Iain Banks in Fiction or Science Fiction.

How do people shelve stuff (books, music and video media)? If you do it by author/artist/director, do you then alphabetize the titles or do you put them in chronological? How about anthologies?

I do it by a mixture of what the book is about (esp. nonfiction), author (for the authors I have a zillion books by) and shelf size.

At work, I use the Library of Congress system, natch.

I divide my books by subject (kids lit, classics, mysteries, SF/Fantasy, general fiction, etc.), but the only section I then organize further is my romances, which I alphabetize by author. My dvds are also organized by genre (TV series, musicals, SF, action, dramas, comedies). My music is also by genre (show tunes, folk, blues, classical, then all the rest) and subdivided by performer.