More timely old stuff: lifehacker’s 13 Book Hacks for the Library Crowd.

Most of us spend a lot of time in the virtual world these days, but that doesn’t mean we can’t appreciate a good book every now and then.

From your local library to the classroom to the bookstore, there are a lot of tools available to help you save time and money when it comes to the bound world of information. Today, in the interest of lifehacking your bookshelf, I’m rounding up my favorite 13 “book hacks” for getting the most from your bound literature.

This has been stuck in my in-box for a staggeringly long time, but these books are timeless, so I forgive myself. The Rare Book Room offers, well, here:

The “Rare Book Room” site has been constructed as an educational site intended to allow the visitor to examine and read some of the great books of the world.

Over the last ten years, a company called “Octavo” embarked on digitally photographing some of the world ’s great books from some of the greatest libraries. These books were photographed at very high resolution (in some cases at over 200 megabytes per page).

This site contains all of the books (about 400) that have been digitized to date. These range over a wide variety of topics and rarity. The books are presented so that the viewer can examine all the pages in medium to medium-high resolution.

So whether it’s Gutenberg’s Bible of 1455 you’re after, or the Magna Carta, or indeed Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (the perfect reading accompaniment to The Rule of Four),

How could I have missed this? On Nerdworld, Matt Selman offers The Unabridged Rules of Library Management. (Personal libraries, that is.)

RULE #1: THE PRIME DIRECTIVE – It is unacceptable to display any book in a public space of your home if you have not read it. Therefore, to be placed on Matt Selman’s living room bookshelves, a book must have been read cover to cover, every word, by Matt Selman. If you are in the home of Matt Selman and see a book on the living room shelves, you know FOR SURE it has been read by Matt Selman.

Ezra Klein responds:

No, this is all wrong. Bookshelves are not for displaying books you’ve read — those books go in your office, or near your bed, or on your Facebook profile. Rather, the books on your shelves are there to convey the type of person you would like to be. I am the type of person who would read long biographies of Lyndon Johnson, despite not being the type of person who has read any long biographies of Lyndon Johnson.

And, at Inside Higher Ed, where I stumbled across this, Scott McLemmee has some fun with it (”Bookshelf and Self“):

My experience (which can’t be unique) is that some books end up accumulating out of a misguided attempt to win the approval of authors already well-entrenched on my shelves. A few years back, for example, Slavoj Zizek started to insist that I had to be familiar with the work of Alain Badiou - a French poststructuralist philosopher whose work I had never heard of, let alone read. Well, OK, sure. Thanks to some busy translators, Badiou volumes started crowding in, next to all the Zizek titles.

But in short order, Badiou lets it be known that I am expected to understand something about mathematical set theory - and furthermore should come to appreciate one particular approach to formalizing the basic axioms. Chances are, that second part is just not going to happen. I am willing to try to learn to recognize a formalized axiom when I see one, but can promise no more, and even that much is probably pushing it. So, anyway, off to the nearby secondhand bookshop in search of a couple of introductory works. They are terrifying. The shelf in question is starting to turn into a neighborhood I am afraid to visit.

His actual conclusion is much more sensible. But I realize now that I haven’t given the subject nearly enough thought. I’m constantly acquiring books and constantly ordering more bookshelves–about the most thought I give to what goes where is a general attempt to keep like with like. There’s a crime fiction section, a literary fiction section, a poetry section, a film section…but due to the unpredictable sizes and numbers of my books, there are odd little colonies, like the crime fiction that seems to be attacking the poetry.

And I love having hardcovers around to look at, whether I’ve read them or not–having lots of unread books around sustains my hope that I’ll actually live the 537 years required to read them all–but in terms of shelf space, one hardcover equals three paperbacks and so I tend to keep more of the latter.

The artist Nina Katchadourian’s Sorted Books project: sort of cool. (Actually, incredibly cool!)

OK, I see a pattern here.

And even:

While I actually own an inscribed copy of Elisha Cooper’s Crawling–which I received, due to an unusual confluence of events, at a Chicago Bulls game–I didn’t know I’d be Trendspotting (TM) until I stumbled across Mimi Schwartz’s Thoughts from a Queen-Sized Bed.

I realize that two books published five years apart isn’t really a trend–but you have to admit that they look striking together. And I’m certain there’s another similar cover out there. Anyone? Anyone?

I just can’t stand to have that picture of James Patterson be the last image of the week. So how about this instead? Joseph Sullivan of the Book Design Review listed his favorite covers of 2007, 2006, and 2005. At Booklist, we don’t see too many books with the finished covers on them. Looking at Sullivan’s lists is like being in a candy store.

(This is the cover of Zbigniew Herbert’s Collected Poems, 1956-1998)

Richard Nash of Soft Skull Press reminded me of another noteworthy “eye” cover–on Lydia Millet’s How the Dead Dream. The effect is a little different–think of the eye models after years and years of beach time and hard living–but, in its way, strikingly similar.

This book, by the way, was an Editors’ Choice pick as well as a Top 10 Book on the Environment.

I thought the cover of Stephenie Meyer’s forthcoming book looked familiar….

Any other eyes out there?

I like books, and I like libraries–and I think parking garages definitely need a makeover–but this still didn’t work for me. A little theme park-y, maybe?

It’s the parking garage for the Kansas City Public Library, as photographed by Jonathan Moreau. (Spotted by Ben Segedin, Booklist’s Production Director.)