Some statistics on my print collection

...or at least the part that's been entered into the database so far.

This is a long page divided into sections, here are links to go directly to each section:

• Labelled Genres
• People
• Books
• Related Universes
• Arbitrary tagged attributes

Several of the following sections have not yet been updated to limit to the print collection, they report totals of all items. But, since the print section is much better cataloged at this point, it's still a good guide...

Most of my print collection is Science Fiction, with a smattering of other genres. This table lists all the genres I've cataloged by the type of item and a total number of items. [Querying the DB right now, there are 11 things with no genre listed (last I checked, these were all articles, I haven't really decided, yet, how to do a genre classification for articles), these are not counted in the table below. Just in case you got inspired to add up numbers and see that the totals don't match the table on the general stats page.]

One difficulty that I had when marking genres is that I set the database up to have a single genre for each item. That made it difficult when I came to, for example, Science Fiction Mysteries (of which I have a whole book of stories as well as many others). I could have set up a special genre for each combination, but what I did was just mark them as the main genre (usually SF). I've been thinking about making the DB more generalized to support some items with multiple genres, but these are a small subset, and doing that is a lot of work. So, it gets put off...

These two pie charts show what fraction of the books are each genre (i.e. the first column of the preceding table, because that's the most interesting). The first pie chart shows the total graphically. But, the non-SF categories are hard to see in that, so there's another that just shows the non-SF Genres...

There are a total of 310 people (authors, editors, etc.) recorded for 937 items. There are 195 people with only one credit. There are 24 items with multiple authors and 6 items with multiple editors.

The person with the most credits is Isaac Asimov with 64 credits listed (60 as Author, 4 as Editor). Anyone surprised at who came out in that query? That wasn't precoded, the server just now did a query on the database to get that result. But I always knew who was going to be there. You can see more in the page that shows credits, which can be shown ordered by total credits with larger counts first.

Credits come in the following types:

I have a total of 346 books cataloged. They are broken down into the following types:

The reason SFBC books are listed as a separate type is that while they are technically hardcover, the bindings are somewhere in between hardcover and paperback. I suspect they won't stand up quite as well as most hardcover books, even though they would qualify as hardcover if I didn't have a special category.

You can get a list of all books (separated into pages), or search for a particular book. You can look up a particular author/editor to get a list of their credits (both books and other items (stories, introductions, etc.))

Each item in the database may be labelled as being part of a related grouping by belonging to a particular, consistent, alternate "Universe". However, not all such related groups are labeled, yet. The table below shows the tags I've used for the various universes I've cataloged so far in the print media and how many related items of each type that are marked as in that universe. You can click on the universe name to do a search for all the items (not just print) tagged with that universe. There is also a page that lists universes in all item types.

The pie chart shows relative sizes of the universes (by count of books within my collection, universes are actually all the same size...I think). I only count books here. As you can see from the chart stories haven't really been tagged, yet. When they are that might be a separate chart or combined, I'm not sure at this point. So the pie is what universe books — that are marked (a total of 85) — are part of. There are other books in some of these same universes, but that haven't been tagged, yet.

To allow more general info to be kept efficiently, each item can have a set of arbitrary attributes attached to it. These are identified by a tag (such as "subtitle") and a value (the actual subtitle in this case). These are used to keep track of any information that applies to only a small subset of items.

There are a total of 231 attributes assigned to print media.

Some general counts of the tagged attributes that are given to print items:

Page generated 2024-04-26 at 20:17 GMT
Copyright © MMXXIV Michael A. Patton

And finally, a random note:
"There are two kinds of people in the world, those who believe there are two kinds of people in the world and those who don't." -Robert Benchley, Benchley's Law of Distinction