Collectors and Cataloguers, how do you handle filing that one weird book or album with no title or track listing or author or or or

I was reading a book whose ISBN number was actually on a sticker, and was thinking what if every identifying thing of that book was also on a sticker and that sticker fell off? This kind of book would be the bane of bookshops and libraries everywhere, even worse than unwieldy coffee table books that never fit anywhere.

But this is also a problem for electronic media, too, if whoever made it was prickly enough!

How do you handle those weird ones for your own collections?

Burn it. It is an abomination.

oh, a band i like is putting out a 10" record? it must be because they hate me, right?

My favorite Peter Gabriel album is Peter Gabriel.

I had a similar problem myself. Amongst my possessions I have this, which was a tie-in book for the Hayward Gallery's Sonic Boom exhibition back in 2000. I was there! I can't tell if it's a two-CD various artist compilation with an accompanying book, like the old It! CD+booklet magazine, or a collection of essays with a pair of accompanying CDs, or just a glorified concert programme, or what.

H-for-Hayward Gallery? S-for-Sonic-Boom? S-for-South-Bank-Centre? In the end I leave it in the top-left "miscellaneous" section of the shelf. As the chap on Discogs points out there was an accompanying concert which doesn't appear to have been recorded.

i've got a chiptune / computer music white label LP in a plain sleeve that has no info on it apart from a long number etched on the run out groove which brings up zero matches on discogs. i'd actually like to sell it because i don't care much for the music but how would i even list it for sale? so instead it just sits in its own little wtf-is-this-shit? section, ostracized and unloved

xp to AP i also have that Sonic Boom thing! it sits by itself because it's not the same shape as anything else much that i own

only thing i really remember from that exhibition was the Guitar Drag video installation. think it was a Christian Marclay piece but i could be wrong...

oh yeah look it's actually on the CD duh

i _absolutely_ am a digital hoarder. i try to organize it, to make it less of a hoard. my problem is that i download a lot of things that are... incomprehensible. yesterday, i downloaded from youtube a video of a flickering street lamp. it's 26 seconds long. it was posted 13 years ago. it has fewer than 100 views. i will _probably_ file it in my "8 mm home and stock footage" folder. the first question i ask myself when filing things is "how hard will it be to find this if i go looking for it". the second thing i ask myself is "do i care". there's a joy to hoarding, which is think is unique to digital hoarding. it's the joy of stumbling across something i didn't know i had. there's the joy of discovering something i'd forgotten about, but there's a special joy to "unknown unknowns". my files are full of these things. it's sort of... planned serendipity. it's the sort of thing "the algorithm" tries to do, but fails at, because it's not a _person_. 100% guarantee: everything in my archives is something i saw at some point and said "oh, this is cool, i should download this".

the downside is that sometimes i do look for things and can't find them. a few weeks or months ago i was looking for an ebook collecting a wide variety of materials related to Up Against the Wall, Motherfucker, the New York leftist group. i can't find it in my files... i think the only place that had it was the Internet Archive, and it vanished as a result of the ongoing attempt by the corporate oligarchs to purge the IA. like it wasn't one of those things where there's a print publication i can buy... there _is_ a UAWMF print publication, but this had a lot of stuff that wasn't in that publication. well, these things happen.

Is there a reason a text search wouldn't turn it up?

jeez folks, obviously you have separate sections for all these. I have:

a VHS shelf
a DVD shelf
a Blu-Ray shelf
a shelf for 10" shellac/78s etc
a 3" cd section
a clamshelll section
a tape-with-booklet-or-tall-cover section
a 10" section with an 8" snuck in there (E.A.R., also some weirdly shaped John Cooper Clarke single)
a 7" box section along with flexis, 6", 5"
a slipcase CD section
a short CD boxset shelf
a tall CD boxset shelf

get with the program, nerds

also Kate I love that story, god bless obscure youtube videos

closer to the original question, I also have a separate section for small zines, some of them are really small!

oh god, anyone remember hanuman books??

tiny beautiful bastards

they go for some decent money now though eh?

https://pbagalleries.com/lot-details/index/catalog/504/lot/166674/Collection-of-Hanuman-Books-editions

haha, i have a couple of those hanuman books, the live next to my city lights shorties

LOL I also have a section for the two of those I have

(R Hell and P Smith, wish I had the Cookie Mueller one too but oh well)

i have FIVE, fuckin count 'em baby!

Kerouac, Daumal x 2, Picabia, De Kooning

the Dylan one goes for most money but this Richard hell sold for (gasp!) $200...

https://www.ebay.com/itm/375910202911

also they've started doing them again although the new ones look v ugly imo

https://hanumaneditions.com/books

i mean why would you need a box set? the beauty of these is that you could just shove 'em in your jeans pocket and fuck being all prim about it

Is there a reason a text search wouldn't turn it up?

― Philip Nunez

in theory no. in practice, well

it hasn't turned up :woman_shrugging:

i'm not _that_ fussed about it. should've filed it better when i downloaded it. or should've downloaded it, if i didn't.

with e-books i have certain preferences (with penguin/random house/vintage/nyrb at the top) because they're well-designed

but no matter the provenance, i want to add the book cover that is most likely to make me read it