Tuesday Thingers: Recommendations

Today's topic: Recommendations. Do you use LT's recommendations feature? Have you found any good books by using it? Do you use the anti-recommendations, or the "special sauce" recommendations? How do you find out about books you want to read?

I do use the recommendations, but I don't bother with a lot of the adjunctive features; I found they were redundant and mostly just suggested books already offered or ones I already owned. The anti-recommendations seemed split between ones I do already own and ones I'd never bother buying ever.

I find I get a lot of recommendations either from my friends list or member suggestions. I stalk my friends' recently added lists and get a lot of ideas from that. I've been known to email them to ask where they found certain unusual items (though the answers are usually something along the lines of "I was on vacation in this tiny village outside of Munich and I found this little shop in someone's back closet where they had a single copy of this volume, and incidentally the retail price was 100 euros" which tends to be disheartening). I mean, if with my weird tastes I think something's actually obscure and unusual, it's probably truly obscure and unusual, not just a mass market paperback I somehow missed in the NYT best seller list. It's a lot of fun doing this and it's an always-changing recommendation list I love. My LT friends have eclectic interests and tastes, and there's always something fascinating and promising among what they're newly cataloguing or reviewing.

I did get some ideas from the built-in LT recommendation lists, but since they're pretty static, it was more of a one time shot. Mostly what I found were volumes I'd already heard of but hadn't thought of for a while, but which I moved to my BookMooch wishlist (which functions as a TBR/to buy one day list for me as well as a Mooch list). It was classics, both among adult and children's literature for the most part, which I enjoyed seeing as recommendations, but there was very little new or surprising. Still, I really appreciate the feature and do check it periodically.

Tuesday Thingers--Mine! Mine! Only mine!

Do you have any unique books in your library- books only you have on LT? How many? Did you find cataloging information on your unique books, or did you hand-enter them? Do they fall into a particular category or categories, or are they a mix of different things? Have you ever looked at the "You and none other" feature on your statistics page, which shows books owned by only you and one other user? Ever made an LT friend by seeing what you share with only one other user?

There are quite a number of unique books in my library, for a variety of reasons. In fact, as of this morning, it appears I have exactly 100 uniquely held volumes. Most of them are Jewish religious esoterica or Jewish children's books. It's possible a few of these are held by others and need proper disambiguation, a project I should take on one of these days. A couple are books on specific special needs, published by support associations or family/patient support groups; it's not surprising that there aren't other people on LibraryThing who haven't cataloged, "The Terrific Tale of Teddy the (Previously Troubled) Tummy Who is Really Happy Now and Lovin' Life: A Book to Help Kids by APFED." I really need to upload that cover, though; Teddy's cute. Maybe I need to somehow attach a photo of Sachy with his plush Teddy the Tummy, too. Several are needlework or costume books which I collect as avidly as I collect smocked and embroidered baby wear; these include obscure volumes like "Great Costumes 1550 - 1950" which is an annotated museum catalog. I've had to hand enter all of these; there have been a number of works I didn't expect to find already in the system, but which it turned out one or two people did already own. Those are almost all Jewish or children's books.

What my kids consider the most unique volume in our collection, at least that I've catalogued so far, is our edition of "The Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: Household Edition" for while many do own copies of Longfellow's complete works, our volume was printed in 1881, and is still in quite fine shape.

There are about 32 other users in my "You and none other" feature list, but several of those other members share multiple unique listings with me. These are primarily again either religious books or obscure but not rare cookbooks.

I have found a few friends through the "You and none other" feature, and through matching unusual volumes in our library. I know that if others have several children's books meant for Orthodox Jewish families, they're likely to be Jewish and have children; if they have a number of odd but not rare cookbooks, they're probably like me prone to cookbook obsession. If they have books on now-much-neglected needle arts like smocking or French heirloom hand sewing, they just might be fabric or fiber obsessed, poor things. I do like friending people in LT, even though I don't in most other sites; here on LT I really feel like I have a connection with people who go to the trouble of acquiring and cataloguing books similar to those I treasure.