Distractions

While Glenn Reynolds occasionally frets at being thought of as a “public utility”, that problem doesn’t afflict those of us whose blogs go unread except by a handful of friends, relatives and chance arrivals via Google. Therefore, I don’t feel that I’ve left a duty unfulfilled by neglecting to comment on the events of the past week. It’s not that I had nothing to say or lost the impulse to say it. Instead, my free time was taken up by a useful project, one that I’ve contemplated for years but that the Internet has turned from a chore into – almost – an enjoyment.

Over the years I’ve accumulated books, enough that I don’t have even an approximate idea of how many. It must be more than a couple of thousand, but whether “more” is closer to five thousand or twenty I really can’t say. Nor can I always recollect whether I own a particular volume, which has led to the uneconomical acquisition of duplicates. A couple of years ago, a thoughtful niece offered to come to Chicago for the summer to catalogue the collection, in return for room and board (and mayhap the opportunity to meet eligible young men), but then she got a summer job and has now gone on to graduate school. My stabs at doing the job on my own have progressed no further. It’s easy to buy three-by-five cards or, in more recent times, set up a database program, impossibly hard to find the energy and leisure to fill them up with data.

Then, in last Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal, I read an article about LibraryThing, an inelegantly named Web site for recording and organizing information about books. Its conceptual breakthrough is the elimination of typing. One can enter a book’s ISBN or Library of Congress card number, and the program will fill in author, title, date of publication, etc. It isn’t perfect. Amazon has typographical mistakes, a perfectionist will want to make sure to identify the correct edition of each book, and not everything that I own can be located. Nonetheless, the time savings are astonishing, and the system takes little effort to use. Searchable “tags” can also be added (e. g., “Shakespeare Authorship Controversy” or “Medieval History”) to make specific volumes easier to retrieve. In less than two days, I entered over 160 titles in my spare time, which I doubt that I could have done in less than a week by hand (and in any event wouldn’t have done, as boredom would have overwhelmed me first).

So that’s what I was doing while five Supreme Court Justices decided, in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, that (a) we aren’t at war, so the President can’t act like a commander-in-chief, but (b) we are at war, so al-Qa’eda terrorists are entitled to scrupulous treatment under the Geneva Conventions rather than the instant justice traditionally meted out to pirates and other common enemies of mankind.

My LibraryThing plan is to proceed at a sauntering pace, adding a hundred or so books a week until the task is done. It may take a year, or it may take a decade. It’s nice, however, to have the reasonable hope that it can actually be done without monopolizing my attention for half of forever. I can even take a few moments out to think about how to deal with terrorism in the legal world that Justice Stevens has made.