I’m not really an expert…but I’d place this volume in 810, or more specifically 814. 800 is Literature, 810 is American literature written in English, and 814 is for Essays.

If you feel like the work is less a series of Essays than it is ‘General Information’ (ie how-to or other purely informative nonfiction) you might place it in 000 (Information and general works)…possibly 080 (General collections) or more specifically 081 (General collections in English).

Hope this helps!

I have about 4000 books – from picture books (uncataloged est. 400) to Biographies (a little more than 300 this week). Posters, CD’s DVD’s, puzzles, videos and science equipment. Additionally this is opened up for loan to other homeschoolers in our area. I homeschool and this is literally our “school library.” So I also utilize the “borrow”mode and the scan. My only wish would be if the company would invent a scan/label system for all the books I have that do not have scannable UPC’s.

The organization was decided to be public library-ish with tweaks for home school needs (ex. fiction which might be used to teach the Civil War period in categorized with the non-fiction for the same use.

I’ve got shelves of all kinds and a loft dedicated to the library.

My other books are grouped in my own weird little system: poetry together in no particular order, religious books by author, books from school/textbooks by author – then all other books are by author and split onto different shelves depending on whether they are borrowed, unread or already read.
Actually, my bookshelves are really the only thing in the apartment that is settled yet – boxes might be covering most of the floor, but the books are in order!
I have an Excel spreadsheet of all my books by author, title, whether I have read it yet and notes, with separate tabs for borrowed books and loaned books. I actually had no idea there were computer programs for this, and I usually don’t tell people about my spreadsheet because it seems a little OCD. It’s nice to know I’m in good company here!

Prior to that only a 1,000 or so were displayed. 17th,18th and 1800-1856 are behind glass doors in a very large case. Leather and silk bindings, along with some modern first editions are in a matching case.

The front room has one wall full of those overly-ornate Victorian bindings that were mass printed in the late 1800s. These are easy to arrange by color and look quite nice.

Sets of books fill cases wherever I can jam one, reference, art, classics, anthologies, etc.

Every flat spot in the house is occupied by wildly-varied esoteric titles that make for good conversation.

I have never found good shelving for paperbacks; they were ill-fitting or unattractive. I ended up making my own, a 7′ tall by 3′ wide and 8″ deep section will hold 300-400 titles (but weighs about 300lbs empty).

abe.com has free a inventory software named Homebase that is designed for professional booksellers but is great for personal use as well. I have not used it for quite some time (I gave up the quest for accurate inventory long ago) but it was quite handy. I see the new version has more options, including want lists and contact manager.

Less than 10% of my books have an ISBN, so the scanning features are not very useful.

Things I have learned the hard way:

Sunlight fades and greatly speeds the structural deterioration of a book – Glass magnifies sunlight.

High levels of Humidity are not your friends, or at least not a friend to your books.

The age of a book is a greatly misleading indicator of the value/worth of a book.

A permabound paperback which has wrinkles and creases and loose bindings can sometimes be restored to like-new condtion by placing them in the microwave for X amount of seconds. I do not recall exactly what = X, but I do remember that X+1 will reduce the entire thing to ruin.

It all sounds very obsessive until you realize that this is all in theory, and the books are as likely to be anywhere as they are to be in-line on the shelf.

For online cataloging, I like LibraryThing.