Relays of peace-time carpenters, borrowed from their units for a day or two each, fell upon all the benches and table-tops they required, and turned them into five long tiers of book-shelves behind the counter. In the meantime our own Special Artist was busy on a new and noble scheme of decoration, and two or three of us up to our midriffs in the first thousand books. They were a motley herd: the sweepings of unknown benefactors' libraries, the leavings of officers and men, cunning shafts from the devout of all denominations, and the first draft of cheap masterpieces from the base. Classification was beyond me, even if time had been no object: how could one classify 'The Sol of Germany,' 'A Yorkstireman Alroad,' 'The Livinz Waze,' 'From Workhouse to Westminster: Life-Story of With Gooks, M.P.' (four copies), or even the books these titles stood for in the typewritten catalogue that arrived (from Paris) too late to entertain us? All authors in alphabetical order seemed the simplest principle; and in practice even that arrangement ran away with days.
Then each volume had to be labelled (over the publishers' imprint on the binding) and the labels filled in with the letter and number of each in one's least illegible hand; and this took more days, though the rough draft of the catalogue emerged simultaneously; and the merit of the plan, if any, was that the catalogue order eventually coincided with that of the actual books on the shelves. The drawback was that books kept dropping in or turning up too late for insertion in their proper places. I could think of no better way out of this difficulty than by resorting to a large Z class, or dump, for late-comers. This met the case though far from satisfying my instincts for the rigour of a game. Another time (this coming winter, for instance, when I hope to have it all to do again) I shall be delighted to adopt some more approved method of dealing with a growing library; last spring one had to do the best one could by the light of nature. Nevertheless, there was not much amiss (except the handwriting) with the clean copy (in carbon duplicate) of a catalogue which ran to a good many thousand words, and kept two of us out of bed till several successive midnights; for by this time I had a staunch confederate who took the whole thing as seriously as I did, and perhaps even found it as good fun.