I tend to do a lot of things out of annoyance, to be honest. Especially when doing it doesn’t really cost me a lot of money and I can be made to feel like it’s not a drain on my time.
Back in 2005 or so, I decided I was going to keep an online record of my ‘library’ of books. The reasons for this were supposedly to keep records for insurance purposes, but really the reasons were twofold. I had recently bought duplicate copies of books because I simply couldn’t remember if I had a copy or not and I wanted to forestall that, and I was really, really annoyed that I had loaned my copy of The Cathedral and the Bazaar out, with my marginalia, and it had subsequently disappeared. I wanted to know who had what when and moreover, I wanted to be able to email them about it automatically if I needed to.
Since then, I’ve put a lot more work into tracking prices and what books I have than in any kind of email-based book-revenge schemes. I just don’t loan my books out for the most part, unless I think the person I’m loaning to is trustworthy.
This is all really background, to be honest, and not necessary for what I want to talk about, but since part of the reason I’m writing this post is to procrastinate on my papers, I figured I’d go ahead and clue you in. And it does come into play a bit in my motivations. I code when I’m feeling vendictive.
Last Friday, we had presentations in our History of the Book course. There were quite a few really interesting talks, but there was one that stood out. It was a couple of guys from Hispanic Studies who were taking the course as part of a digital certificate. They hadn’t had the same sort of interest in the course as everyone else, it seemed, and it showed. But still, not that big a deal. Until they showed their final project — an online ‘collection.’
Now, I am not so petty as to think that what I’ve done is special or unique. There are a lot better products out there, for free, than what I’ve developed, and I use it mostly because I like the fact I can add what I want when I want without difficulty. But what these guys had done was code a series of static html pages with a little bit of javascript to make pictures of the books they had taken rotate. It was intro-level CS 100 sort of stuff, and even at that it didn’t look very good. It wasn’t formatted nicely, and the whole thing felt like a potemkin website.
I like functionality over appearance. That’s why my online presence tends, for the most part, to be pretty bare-bones as far as themes, decoration, etc goes. It’s not that I don’t appreciate something elegant — I just know that I don’t really have the sort of design chops to make something both functional and asthetically pleasing, so I always go for functional. I didn’t say anything during the presentation, but as Friday wore on into Saturday it bothered me, and my inherent sense of fairness.
For our project, my friend Mark and I had done a collation of a book I owned, the edition of Spenser I’ve spoken about here. After doing that, we’d emailed institutional owners of the book as well as rare book dealers to try to get their collations, with the intent of seeing if they matched and to trace the errors where they didn’t. The goal of all this is to see if we could ascertain the reasons for it — if corrections happened on the fly or if errors were introduced during the printing process — and to perhaps be able to pin down some sort of rough chronology of printing errors. I think we’ve done a pretty good job so far, and the project is still ongoing (at least for me). We have an edition of the work from Kansas State coming this week, hopefully, for us to take a look at. It’s not much — minutae, really — but it does fill a void that appears to exist in the study of this particular edition. If notes were still a viable form of academic publication, I think it would be worthy of one. We had done a lot of work.
So it bothered me that this had been passed off as something on the same level as this, or any of the other projects we heard about. But I was nice, and I didn’t ask the questions I should have because I didn’t want to show anyone up. But it still bothered me all Saturday. Until I decided to do the one thing they had that I hadn’t added — pictures — and to do it right.
They had added pictures for insurance purposes, which is really a good idea and something that had occurred to me, but at the time I didn’t have a camera. This recently changed, so that wasn’t a stumbling block.
My initial forays were with my camera handheld with the flash off. This worked in some situations, but it was cumbersome if the light wasn’t good enough, and I ended up with a few blurry shots. I needed something more stable if I was going to make this work, and I also needed a way to position the books so that they would appear relatively square in the frame without having to eyeball it each time. The solution to that, after a quick trip to Michaels, was a rotary cutting mat. It was sturdy enough to feel like it would last and it was ruled so I could place the book square on the surface.
With the mat in hand, and after some careful fiddling with my tripod and a table, I had my setup:

As you can see, the biggest issue was to get the camera downward-facing. Having the camera downward-facing with the tripod set up normally would have ended up with a lot of the tripod in the way and a devil of a time positioning the book. The way I ended up getting around this was by placing two of the legs on a table, then extending the third leg of the tripod over the edge of the table. With the camera canted as you see in the picture, though, this wasn’t a particularly stable setup, so I wrapped the longer leg in cloth and used a weight to force it into a stable position. I’m still not entirely happy with this and I’d like a weight that attaches directly to the leg to forestall the possibility of accidents, but this works for now.
The other problem with a tripod (or at least my tripod) is that pressing the button on the camera can set up enough of a vibration that the photo might end up blurry if it’s a long exposure, which sort of defeats the purpose of the tripod in the first place. Luckily the Canon 50D has a way around this that doesn’t involve buying a remote.
If you hook the camera up to a computer as though you were going to download the photos, one of the options available is remote shooting. So with the longest USB cable I could find of the right type, I was set to go.
The way I took the pictures was to first take a picture of the front cover of the book with the dustjacket on, if it had one:

Next I took a picture of the spine and rear of the book. The intention here is to show if the dustjacket is chipped at all and whether or not there are indications that it’s a book club book, which is sometimes denoted by a numerical sequence on the dust jacket as well as information in the publisher’s text block. This particular book isn’t, as you can see by the ISBN in the second picture:


The next picture taken is of the publisher’s text block. This is important because it is really the only record you have of the particular printing and edition of the book you have. If you have a true first edition (first printing of the first edition) of a book that’s relatively well-known, like House of Leaves or any of the Harry Potter books, it’s considerably more valuable than if you have the 37th printing, for example. You can tell whether it is a first edition, where it isn’t overtly stated, by the number block:

In this instance, the number block runs all the way from 10 to one. When the first printing is completed, the one drops off, and it will run from 10 to 2, and so on. This isn’t a universal — every publisher denotes this differently — and there are guides out there to help you figure out how a publisher was showing first editions during a particular time.
After I have taken the pictures with the dustjacket on, I take it off and repeat the three shots with just the book itself. This is to note any issues that might have happened to the book. Maybe it was stored with the dustjacket off, or maybe the dustjacket was found and added to a book that didn’t originally have one. In this case, none of these were the case, but note that the ISBN is repeated on the rear board of the book:



I then take a picture of the dustjacket of the book displayed without the book itself. This helps to make any holes, chips, and so forth clear. In the case of this book, it actually was longer than the frame of the camera, so I had to do it in three pieces:



Lastly, I take pictures of anything odd or unusual about the book. This might be a former owner’s stamp or bookplate, or in the case of the Silmarillion and my 1965 edition of Lord of the Rings, it’s the maps that were included. I recently aquired this book, so I still had the bill of sale from the bookseller:

I haven’t quite decided what to do with these. I had been throwing them away, but after taking History of the Book I’m wondering if I should keep them with the text. But that’s neither here nor there.
After taking the pictures, I then have to upload them to the website and make sure they append to the proper record. It seemed sort of silly to make that a two stage process, especially since I don’t know how many pictures each book will have associated with it. So I included the upload stuff with the rest of the form to change the record. To make that change, I start by going to my admin page:

Once there, I select “look up a book in your library,” which takes me to this page:

The lookup page is a just your basic search functionality — it lets people limit how the database responds. Since I have only one book with the word anathema in the title, it will return only one result when the form is sent:

The gobbleygook at the top is the SQL query that is used to grab the record — I put it there for testing purposes and haven’t had a need to get rid of it yet. If you select the record, you get the following:

What we’re interested in (finally, I hear you all saying) is the link that says “Update information on this book.” Clicking that will get us to the record change page:

. As you can see, this is a webform that lets me change any of the information we just saw. What we’re interested in is the series of image file upload buttons at the bottom of the page. By clicking on one of those, I can select my photographs for uploading:

I tend to put the images in the order I generally take them in.
After selecting your images, I click on the button at the bottom. The images are then uploaded, the record is appended with a list of the file names, and I’m returned to the record:

Now admittedly my pictures don’t spin around, but I think they’re a whole lot more useful in terms of information about the book, and a whole lot more valuable for insurance purposes.
Coding just the picture functionality was about a couple of hours work, and it is functional, which is a lot more than I can say for the mess I saw on Friday.