Catalog your book collection

Take a book off your shelf and turn to the back of the title page. That page tells you who published your copy, where and when, who printed it, and often how many times it had been reprinted before yours came off the press. Cataloging a book collection on ctlgs starts there.

The books catalog holds 157,080 editions of about 21,000 books, and one click adds any of them to your collection as a copy. The condition, the shelf it sits on and what you paid can wait until you have the book in your hand. You can also leave them out altogether.

If you have never cataloged a shelf before, start with the ten books nearest to you. Pull each one out, open it to the copyright page, and find it in the catalog.

Find the edition you actually own

Every title in the catalog is a book, and under it sit its editions, one for each time a publisher printed it in a form you could buy. The Hobbit has 51 editions here, from Allen & Unwin paperbacks of the 1970s to Finnish and Irish translations. Two of them are the same Unwin Books paperback, with the same ISBN and the same 60p cover price. One is the 1971 impression and the other the 1974, and each has its own page, because a collector sorting a shelf wants to know which one is there.

So when you add a copy, add it to the edition you are holding rather than the first result with the right title. The copyright page tells you the publisher, the year, the ISBN if there is one, and often the printing. How to tell a first edition goes through reading that page, and editions and pressings explains why the catalog is built this way. Nearly 80,000 editions have an ISBN recorded, so if your book has one, searching for it is the fastest route in.

Record the copy

Adding a copy opens a small form you can skip and come back to. The fields are the ones a collector cares about:

• Condition, graded As new, Fine, Near fine, Very good, Good, Fair or Poor. Condition grading explained says what each one means.
• Notes, for anything that belongs to your copy rather than the edition: a signature, a bookplate, a price-clipped jacket, a previous owner's name on the flyleaf.
• Location, purchase price and date acquired. These three are always private, whatever privacy setting your collection has.

You can also add fields of your own to the books catalog. A field can be a yes/no, a line of text or a list of choices, such as "Signed by", or Main shelf against Spares. Only you see them.

Two copies are two records. One member owns four copies of the 1982 Puffin first printing of The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, each graded on its own, and the edition page lists all four in a row you can drag into whatever order you like.

Your wantlist

Beside the collection button is a wantlist button. It sits on the edition too, so your wantlist can say you have the paperback and still want the Folio Society hardback.

Your collection page

Your collection lives at one address, across every catalog. The books in it show as a grid of covers you can search, filter by condition or location, and sort by title, date added, date acquired or condition. It exports to CSV, with your private fields included when the collection is your own. Collections and wantlists covers the lists in full.

Shelves are separate from the collection. A shelf is a list you make and publish, in your own order, with a note on each entry, and it can hold things you do not own: Penguin Modern Classics in series order, or every Ace Double you have handled. See shelves. When you want to part with a copy, mark it for sale from the copy itself. Selling from your collection explains how.

When your edition is missing

The common Penguin or Vintage paperback is probably there already. A translation, a book club edition, a later impression or a magazine often is not. Magazines are a big part of this catalog, with 30,600 of them, and zines and sheet music alongside.

Anyone signed in can add an edition. Copy what the book says about itself: the dates as printed, each with its type (First Published, Reprinted, This Impression), the ISBN and any other code, the printer's key if there is a number line, the publisher and imprint as credits, and the page count. If the title is new to the catalog as well, the Book + Edition form creates both at once and links them.

The catalog came from Bookogs, and what happened to Bookogs tells that story. If you had a collection there, it can be attached to your new account. The reasoning behind all of this is in what you own, down to the copy.