Whaddaya mean, someone else owns a copy?!

I was shocked to discover that someone else on LibraryThing had a copy of Jacquard Mechanism and Harness Mounting. What books in your collection were you surprised to find someone else in LT has?

What I find even more interesting is to look at the list of books I share with one other person, and note the cases in which I share more than one book with a single other member. Often, of course, they are similar books. It is not surprising, for example, that I share two books about fans with the same member. But Elsie Dinsmore on the Loose and A Pageant of Hats? Women of Homer and The Franklin Report: Chicago, The Insider's Guide to Home Services? Curious.

Heh ... I'm always amazed when I find people with my old poetry collections in their libraries!

 

I bought a book on Etruscan archaeology because it had photographs of a site I know well. When I went to put it on LibraryThing it was not too surprising that there was one other copy, but I was extremely startled to realize that it belongs to someone I know personally, via Abebooks forums, and who was actually with me in the store - visiting Canada from England - when I purchased the book (although she didn't remember in the store that she owned it - no doubt due to a combination of the age of the book which she'd probably had since uni, and the size of her library).

Most of my one-other books, I'm surprised that more people don't have them in their libraries. Except for the 1938 Scott stamp catalogue. If there wasn't a long story behind it, I'd wonder why *I* had it in my library.

Hmmm. Lots of candidates:

Bed Bug Handbook: The Complete Guide to Bed Bug and Their Control

Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons

Archaeology of Tom Jeffords' Chiricahua Indian Agency

Sewerage: The designing, constructing and maintaining of sewerage systems and sewage treatment plants

The History of Road Building Equipment

Sinks of London Laid Open A Pocket Companion for the Uninitiated, to Which is Added a Modern Flash Dictionary Containing all the Cant Words, Slang Terms, ... a List of the Sixty Orders of Prime Coves

Coal Tar Distillation And Working Up Of Tar Products

Assembler Language for FORTRAN, COBOL, and PL/I Programmers

1:100 000-scale metric topographic map of Denver East, Colorado map digitized

Steam Locomotive Coaling Stations and Diesel Locomotive Fueling Facilities

A Companion's Guide for Travelling I-80: Iowa Really Isn't Boring

A Cemetery of Palace Attendants

The Canals of New York State

The paleoecological history of two Pennsylvanian black shales

Bunny Rabbits Iron-on Transfers

Soil survey of Montgomery and Schenectady Counties, New York

NFPA 13, 2010 Edition: Standard for the Installation of Sprinkler Systems

The Cobra Goddess of Ancient Egypt: Predynastic, Early Dynastic and Old Kingdom Periods

The Principality of Liechtenstein: A documentary handbook

Technical approaches to characterizing and cleaning up brownfields sites: Railroad Yards

The New Gravity Einstein Monster Number Two 2

Hitler's ashes: seeds of a new Reich!

as a more or less random selection of books shared with one other.

My most surprising was Bird Life in Wington, a book of cute didactic animal stories from the 1950s. Originally it was just me and the author's nephew, but now there are four of us.

5: I am curious as to why you have maps of Denver and Schnectady. They're not exactly close to each other.

>6 aulsmith: I am curious as to why you have maps of Denver and Schnectady. They're not exactly close to each other.

Live in Denver. Did field work in upstate New York.

7. Makes sense. I used to work in the Manuscript section of the New York State Library in Albany where most of the maps were and worked with a number of the geologists at the State Museum. Your map collection is very admirable.

I have to admit, the book that I'm most surprised that someone other than me has in Librarything is my own book, German Villages in Crisis: Rural Life in Hesse-Kassel and the Thirty Years War. I know how many copies it has sold and how many of those ended up in universities libraries. I didn't think there were enough left to have two other people in Librarything besides me own it.

A reminder, if you are interested in books that no one else in Librarything shares, there is a group --ULTB -- for that.

Setnahkt, you have a very weird assortment of books, and I mean that in the best possible way. I have several editions of NFPA 13, but it seems the only one I have managed to catalog was a facsimile reproduction of the original 1896 version, issued in 1996 for the centennial.
http://www.librarything.com/work/2672290/book/13276054

I think "shocked" is too strong a word. I'd have to say that, from time to time, I find it interesting that there is "at least" one other person with a copy in their library. Those books I have in common with just one additional member are primarily of a type - first person accounts of railroading - and many of them have the same member as the other owner. What is fun is to note those books I have in common with individuals other than that one member and to take a look at their collections. Several times, these drop by visits have prompted me to look into one or more books and actually add the book of interest to my library.

Hi,

Any of my own books - but someone does own one!

I have 64 shares with 'exactly' one other person, and was more interested in that out of those 64 books, there were multiple shares with 7 other Librarything members. One member shared four books with me. :D

It is interesting, as it includes books that I had completely forgotten about (and really don't even remember): "A Hittite manual for beginners" or "A manual of pathology".

Quite a few are understandable: old recipe books, foreign language books, manga, etc., but a surprising number are fairly common children's books, but that are just unlisted on Libraything.

Of course there is the Unique Library Thing Book group where people compare notes on distinct books and how many they have compared with their overall collection size.

Combination of titles can quickly affect this kind of statistic since what seems "unique" or a "singleton" can soon prove to be otherwise. The "common children's books" probably will prove to be books waiting to be combined. Manual entries and other details can delay or prevent the automatic combination.

If you find someone's catalog with a couple of your singletons, perhaps you have more in common with them than you thought, unless they are stalking you and adding books just so you're not the only one :)

James

Thanks, Keeline, for the suggestion; I hadn't considered looking into how many ULTBs I had. :D