Sorting

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When viewing your library, you can sort it according to a particular column by clicking on the column heading (if the heading is blue - a few cannot be used for sorting and will have a black heading). (This is also explained at HelpThing:Catalog#Sorting.) To sort it in the opposite order, click on the same column heading again. In order to sort by two columns - for instance, by author's name but with titles in alphabetical order within each author - do the sub-sort (titles, in this example) first and then do the main sort (authors, in this example). Note, however, that a bug causes the sub-sort to end up backwards in Internet Explorer 6; this can only be remedied by using a different browser.

Every language and style has its particular sorting rules, and authors will invariably try to get around those rules in some new and creative way to make their title distinctive or funny. Here are some tips for forcing idiosyncratically labeled information to sort correctly:

How do I make LT correctly sort and order a title beginning with an article ("a", "the", "an") used as a noun or in some other non-article way?

If you put a two "pipe" characters before the "A" like this:

||A is for ...

then LibraryThing knows it should be sorted on the full title.

See, e.g., Lyn Davies, A Is for Ox: The Story of the Alphabet; Mike Lester, A Is for Salad; A Is for Abductive

On a US keyboard, the pipe character is typed as "shift-backslash".

Similarly, you can use this "pipe trick" to force LibraryThing to ignore foreign language articles, such as the German "die", as in "Die ||Blechtrommel", or special characters, as in "…||And Now Miguel".[1]

I have a book I acquired in 1960. When I sort by date acquired, it moves to the top, ahead of those with no acquisition date. How do I fix this?