Strong Verbs Are Just Better

niamh_sage quotes this old article on Neil Gamain:

Gaiman was born in Portchester, England, in 1960 and says he was "a much weirder kid than I ever thought I was". At seven he begged his parents for his own bookcase and carefully covered each book in clear plastic and put them in alphabetical order. He throws his hands up and says "Now that's f---ing weird! No seven-year-old does that."

Oh yeah, Mr Gaiman? I take your covered-and-alphabetised bookshelf and raise it one mostly covered and completely alphabetised bookshelf, *with handwritten white tags on all the fiction books saying things like F-MON and F-BLY*. If I knew the Dewey system I'd have tagged my non-fiction as well.

By age seven, I understood that the natural state of books is Catalogued and Labelled. Not bookshop-pristine, oh no. That is nice, but a book is not truly a book until it is in a library.