Into the Woods

What do two nerds do on a rainy day? They empty all the bookshelves, stack the books on the floor, scan all the titles into a database, and put the books back onto the shelves, in alphabetical order by category. Including the scanning that I had done before Ken’s visit, this was a total of about 30 hours of work. This gives me a whole new appreciation of what librarians do. Now the abbey’s seven bookshelves are all in order.

The database is an app that runs on smartphones named BookBuddy. If a book has a scannable ISBN number, then the app will do all the work. If the book has an ISBN number but no scannable bar code, then the app will recognize the title and lots of other information after the ISBN number is keyed in. For older books with no ISBN number, the app can search by title and identify most books, even books more than a hundred years old.

All of Ken’s books — or at least all of Ken’s books in the U.S. as opposed to his current home in Scotland — are here at the abbey. Ken’s books and mine are remarkably compatible and complementary, as might be expected of literary confederates and former housemates in a house where six books have been written in the last ten years and nursed through the publication process. As for the books that Ken has written, you can find out more at his web site.

Ken is on a speaking tour in the U.S. When he arrived here from Scotland, he brought me bottle of GlenDronach Scotch. That Scotch is from Forgue, 35 miles north of Aberdeen.