For this week’s Tuesday Thingers the questions are about the most unpopular books you own. 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?

My answer:

I have 44 unique books in my LT account. They are a mixture of books on cookery, yoga, gardening, local history/guide books, wildlife, biography/autobiography and a handful of fiction. I think some of these are just because they are different editions; for example I’m not the only person who owns D H Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, but presumably I’m the only one to own this particular publication.

I feel quite protective now about these books. Mountains on the Moon is by a friend so I’m sad I’m the only person with this book. Michael Arthern is a retired biology teacher and wrote this book when he retired having been granted a studentship at Regents Park College, Oxford. He is a Christian who believes that science and faith enhance each other and so he is interested in the science versus religion debate. His book covers a number of scientists through nearly three thousand years from Thales c.625 – c.547 BC to Francis Collins, the director of the Human Genome Project, including Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Max Planck and Einstein.

As for cataloguing them some of them I found from the ISBN, but a lot I entered manually, which is like ‘proper’ cataloguing, although I’ve been brief with some of the information. I’m a bit particular about the cover I use as well, which means that I’ve had to scan many of my books to get the right cover. I still have many to do to get rid of the default covers. 

I didn’t know about the “You and none other” feature before today. There are 24 books listed there that I share with only one other person – and not one of them is the same person!