Booklover’s Guide is a sweeping attempt to provide a comprehensive education to the home book collector about ALL aspects of maintaining their collection. It covers the book arts, library audits, acquisitions, displaying books, classification systems, repair, weeding, other libraries and many other topics. There are excellent annotated bibliographies at the end of each chapter pointing you to books and other resources to learn even more.

Personally I loved the chapter on Weeding – it has convinced me I need to implement a formal program immediately to keep my collections from becoming unwieldy. Some of the chapters, like Repair were a bit confusing as too many experts with conflicting opinions were quoted. Some of the chapters are no longer relevant, like Electronic and Online Books as this was written in the dark ages of the Internet (c.1995-96). But the more likely problem you will experience is there is simply more information here than you can actually use.

Overall this is an excellent reference for anyone who wants to get more serious about how they interact with their books. Recommended for all LibraryThingers who don’t have their MLS and want to step it up a notch. ( )