Seacoast History Blog # 127
October 2, 2011

I finally did it. I sat down and put together a list of books about Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Mostly they are ones off my shelf, mostly history. Made myself stop at 150 title, but I hope to keep adding them. The super amazing part of all this is that you can see my list in seconds. I created it on WorldCat.org, the incredible database of every official book (those with ISBN numbers registered with the Library of Congress). I can update the list in seconds. You can search it, even print it in a variety of bibliographical styles on your printer. Now let me tell you why. (Continued below)

My wife Maryellen runs the Discover Portsmouth Center (DPC), a free welcome center and exhibit space situated in what was the Portsmouth Library at 10 Middle Street. The brick building dates to 1810. It’s two buildings, really, joined by a 20^th century section, and one of the most interesting spaces in town. The DPC has one nice shelf of new books about Portsmouth including three or four of my own. When I moved to town in the 1970s there were half a dozen downtown book stores – including Bob’s, the Little Professor including, the used books shops at end of State Street. Now there’s one. Riverrun is great, but it can’t carry everything. Strawbery Banke has a nice shelf of local books as does the Tugboat Shop. Barnes & Noble is way over in the mall.

My favorite downtown activity used to be perusing the “Local Titles” section of the old shops. That’s really where I started this career -- sitting on a stool in a back room pouring over local history and lore, although I rarely had the cash to afford the costly vintage books.

So I got thinking – why not add a Vintage Books shelf to the Discover Center? And suddenly I’m on a volunteer committee of one to do just that. Since this is currently a Portsmouth orientation center, I want to stick to Portsmouth-area books, which includes at least New Castle, Kittery, and the Isles of Shoals. Since I have a budget of zero (this being a nonprofit agency) my goal is to get people to donate vintage books from the area. I easily found a dozen on my shelf that are duplicates I don’t need. (I have 34 different editions of Aldrich’s “Story of a Bad Boy” but I’m hanging on to those.) I figure history buffs like me will have half a dozen each. I’d like at least 100 volumes to get the store up and running.

But where to start? I turned to Worldcat.org because the site allows users to build their own LISTS from the zillions of books in the database. Bibliographies can take a long time to assemble, but here the details (author, title, publisher, date) are already available in an authoritative master list. It took only a single afternoon to click off 150 titles. I started mostly with books about Portsmouth, but included a few fiction books by local authors too. There’s no limit to the topics – travel, poetry, UFOs, etc – as long as the book contains material on Portsmouth.

SEE MY PORTSMOUTH BOOK LIST HERE

Since we only want books related to this area, WorldCat allowed me to create a master list of the books we are looking to put in the vintage store. And at the same time, it allows me to create a neat resource for you or anyone searching for Portsmouth books. I posted the list for public use (and have a few more lists I’m working on behind the scenes.) You can view it alphabetically by author or title or by publication date. You can see which books have been added recently. If you own the book that is missing a cover photo, you can scan your copy and add the image to the file. You can even add your own book reviews to the site.

There’s more. I hope to add metatags so you can find groups of related books (eg. fiction, or books about boats, or the 17^th century) more easily in the future. And I can add NOTES to tell you why I picked a particular book for my list. And Worldcat allows you to search for a library near you that may carry any book you select. How awesome is that?

And you can even send me an email to suggest books I have missed.

But best of all – you can send or bring copies you no longer need to the DPC so they can sell them and pay the bills. The organization needs to locate $3 million to keep the lights on in the next few years. This fall and winter, through grants, loans, generous gifts, and donations from visitors – the DPC plans to do $800,000 worth of renovations to the antiquated HVAC system in the building – a building owned by the City of Portsmouth and managed by the Portsmouth Historical Society.

I have no plans, currently, to sell vintage books on commission. For the moment, it’s too much hassle. The best way to make money, it appears, is to take items generously donated and to sell them. If people donate and people buy, these wonderful books about my favorite town will change hands – and support the DPC.

It’s a work in progress. But you can see the list as it now stands simply by clicking here. I haven’t yet put in books from the Isles of Shoals, or just a few. There are lots of them, including more than a dozen items by Celia Thaxter herself. I have over 50 books about John Paul Jones alone here in my office, so he may need a list of his own. WorldCat includes some articles, and I may add those too, and maybe used DVDs. I’ve got expansive plans if this works. I hope to open the Vintage Bookshelf in May of 2011.

Check it out. Send me your notes and drop off your books. It’s a high tech way of getting used paper books back in the hands of those who love them.