The Great Picture Book Culling begins

As Wendi reported earlier, she and Jo are working through our enormous collection of picture books as a part of her school Read-a-Thon. Our other purpose though has been to initiate what we're calling The Great Picture Book Culling. For years (and years!) Wendi got free picture books sent to her by publishers when she was the kids book and toy buyer for Joseph-Beth. We kept nearly all of them, but the time has come to decide which will join our permanent collection, and which will be traded in/re-gifted.

It's Wendi's and Jo's jobs to cull the books. It's my job then to add them to our LibraryThing list. For the uninitiated, LibraryThing is a place to catalog your personal book collection online. There are other social aspects to it as well--you can "friend" other collectors with similar tastes, join discussion groups with people who share your interests, etc.--but the sheer joy of the thing for me is having every book we own cataloged and tagged. It delights the anal collector in me that is also, in an Excel spreadsheet, cataloging every comic book I own. (A far more tedious task.)

So far, almost none of our picture books have been added to LibraryThing. We held off because we always knew the Great Culling was coming, we just didn't know when. In Atlanta, we thought it would be after we finished adding all our adult books to LibraryThing. Then we moved, and we decided not to add them until we could sift through them, adding only what we wanted to keep to the new house.

Now, moving day once again approacheth. (And no, we still don't know exactly when it will be, but January is now a real possibility.) So the time has come to weed out those picture books that aren't keepers. Wendi wants to blog about the ones we're hanging on to, as she did here in our first round, but we've voted not to list the ones we're not keeping. As an author, I know *I* appreciate it when people keep their negative opnions to themselves. :-P

This morning, our LibraryThing collection featured 2,047 books. Now it lists 2,053. Six picture books added, and many, many more to come...