The Home Library Problem Solved

Zack Grossbart writes "About 18 months ago I posted the following question to Ask Slashdot: 'How do you organize a home library with 3,500 books?' I have read all the responses, reviewed most of the available software, and come up with a good solution described in the article The Library Problem. This article discusses various cataloging schemes, reviews cheap barcode scanners, and outlines a complete solution for organizing your home library. Now you can see an Ask Slashdot question with a definitive answer."

Nowq he has to solve the home server meltdown ...

No posts, and already slashdotted!

Re:Nowq he has to solve the home server meltdown .

It doesn't appear slashdotted to me, but just in case:

In March of 2006 my wife Mary and I owned about 3,500 books. We both have eclectic interests, voracious appetites for knowledge, and a great love of used bookstores. The problem was that we had no idea what books we had or where any of them were. We lost books all the time, cursed late into the night digging through piles for that one book we knew must be there, and even bought books only to find that we already owned them. There were books on random shelves, books on the floor, we were tripping over books when we walked up and down the stairs. In short, we had a mess.

We needed to get organized. We needed a way to store all of our books so they were easily accessible. We also needed to integrate the two separate book collections which represented one of the remaining holdouts of our single lives. We got together and came up with a list of requirements for our new system. ...and yes we are both engineers.

1. It needs to be easy to find a book.
2. It needs to be easy to add a book to the system.
3. The systems needs to handle foreign language books.
4. It needs to be easy to maintain the system going forward.
5. The initial cataloging effort can't take forever.

To complete this project we needed a system to organize all of the books, a way to quickly add books to that system, and a place to store all of the books.

A Place for Everything and Everything in Its Place

Our first task was to decide what system we should use for ordering the books. Most of the systems used to organize books are based on combinations of the author's name, the title of the book, and the category of the subject matter. Some of the systems provide a general outline for where a book should be and other systems are very specific. We considered three different systems: alphabetical, Dewey Decimal, and Library of Congress.

Alphabetizing

Probably the most common system used for organizing home libraries is alphabetizing. Books are arranged in alphabetical order by title or author's name. This makes books reasonably easy to find, but puts Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie next to Runner's World Guide to Injury Prevention by Dagny Scott Barrios. This organization makes it difficult to browse books.

Adding categorization to alphabetical sorting can fix that problem. This system organizes books into categories and then alphabetically within those categories. In this system the book Three Seductive Ideas by Jerome Kagan might end up next to The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker because they are both about psychology. This system makes browsing by subject possible, but it requires you to create categories for each book. Should The State, War, and the State of War by Kalevi J. Holsti be categorized as international relations, warfare, or politics? Creating categories which will work well with a set of unknown books is very difficult. We needed a system with established categories.

Dewey Decimal

Dewey Decimal is familiar to just about everyone who came through the American educational system. There is a good chance the library from your grade school used Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC for short). DDC assigns each book a number based on its subject matter. DDC organized all categories into three levels. The system has 10 main classes, 100 divisions and 1000 sections. The book Larousse Gastronomique edited by Prosper Montagne may have a DDC number of 641.3/003 21 - 600 the main class for technology, 641 is the division for food and drink, and 3/003 21 indicates the specific subsection specified in that library.

However, DDC has one big problem. The assigned numbers are not fixed. There is no central authority assigning DDC numbers to books and the same book can have a different number in two different libraries. We didn't want to spend time working out the right catalog number for each of our books; we just wanted to look it up. We could use the catalog of a large library system such as the Minuteman Library Network to provide DDC numbers for most of our books, but that system does not provide programmatic access to their database and does not assign numbers to many of the books we own.

Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky has an LCC number of TN900.K865 2003. This indicates that it belongs to the broad topic of technology, the sub topic of mining, metallurgy, and the subclass of nonmetallic minerals. It has a Cutter number of K865 representing the author's name and it was published in 2003. Library of Congress Classification

It was Mary who suggested using Library of Congress classifications (LCC for short). This is the system used in most university libraries in the United States. LCC uses two letter general codes followed by a set of letters and numbers specifying the location of the book. The LCC system was created in 1897 and has held up quite well for over 100 years. Wikipedia has a great reference page about the Library of Congress Classification system including a list of all the categories here.

Many books already have LCC numbers printed on their copyrights page. The Library of Congress also makes its catalogs available at http://catalog.loc.gov./ [catalog.loc.gov] The LCC system offered us a system which categorized all of our books into a well known list with categories which could be looked up programmatically. This is the system we chose.

To recap:

• Alphabetizing with Categorization - Required us to design the subject categories, isn't very precise, and must be done manually.
• Hard Alphabetizing - Works a little better with computers, but has all of the other drawbacks of soft alphabetizing.
• Dewey Decimal (DDC) - Has better sorting, but subject categories are still somewhat subjective.
• Library of Congress (LCC) - Provides excellent sorting capabilities, has pre-defined subject categories, and can be categorized programmatically.

The Catalog

When I was 9 years old we had to take library class, spending time in the school library learning how to use it. Mrs. Snuffleupagus (none of use could pronounce her real name) would walk us over to a large cabinet full of index cards and tell us to use them to look up books while admonishing us to not touch any of them because our fingers were probably sticky.

Mary and I wanted a digital catalog with good support for sorting and an easy way to add, edit, and delete books. We also needed a catalog which would support LCC numbers and have a good interface when handling the number of books we had It should preferably work under Microsoft Windows or Linux, the two OS's we are currently running.

I started my search by posting the question to SlashDot.org. I got a lot of responses. Some were useful, others were less so. My favorite was, "I think you lost most of the slashdotters when you started with 'My Wife...' People are googling this 'wife' to see what they can find out about the phenomenon." I thanked my good fortune that I am interested in computers while still being blessed with female companionship and compiled a list of options. I first looked for a good open source alternative, but I couldn't find one. I then figured the project was worth spending a little money on and compiled the following list.

1. Readerware
2. Delicious Monster
3. Collectorz.com Book Collector
4. FinderWare

Readerware

Readerware is flexible and pretty fast. It has a decently clean interface and supports Windows, Linux, Mac, and even Palm. You can create your own columns and it has pretty good support for Library of Congress Catalog information (with the addition of a provided Python script). It will find the LCC number based on the ISBN number. Readerware can also be customized with your own Python scripts. It costs $40. We chose Readerware.

Delicious Monster

Delicious Monster also costs $40. It runs only on MacOS, but that wasn't the biggest issue for us. Delicious Monster has a slick looking interface which most Mac users will find familiar. However, it feels like a better solution for organizing 100 DVDs instead of 3,500 books. It also doesn't have good support of Library of Congress Catalog numbers.

Collectorz.com Book Collector

Collectorz also costs $40 (actually $39.95) and works on Windows and Mac. It has the same problem as Delicious Monster of feeling like it is aimed at smaller databases. It also doesn't have support for Library of Congress Numbers.

FinderWare

FinderWare also costs $40 runs only on Windows and once again feels like it is aimed at smaller libraries. It also has a clunky interface for adding multiple books at once and does not support Library of Congress Classification numbers.

A Custom Made Catalog

Readerware was a good fit, but it wasn't perfect. This got me working overtime to create something better. "I can build my own catalog system," I thought. It would be exactly what I needed, support large amounts of data, and import automatically from the Library of Congress Catalogs. "I'm a professional software developer. I could bang this out in a day or two." The system would have a new kind of interface on the library data, so easy and intuitive to use that it would take over the world. Every library on Earth could use my software.

Mary found me a couple of hours later surrounded by the full Edward Tufte collection and every book on user interfaces we own. Well... only the books I could find. That is why we needed the system in the first place. It took one look from her for me to come to my senses and decide that building my own library software would be a much bigger project than I had time for.

The Scanner

Now that we had a library catalog system we needed to add the books to it. Most books have a copyright page containing publisher and cataloging information, most books published after 1975 have an ISBN number, and most books published after 1985 have a barcode on the back which contains the ISBN number. The ISBN (International Standard Book Number) is a unique number identifying that book. This number contains information about the book, where it is from, and who published it. You can use this number to look up the rest of the information about a book from many online sources.

The problem with the ISBN number is that it isn't a very good number to use to catalog the books. Sorting by ISBN number would create a list which didn't have anything to do with the author or the subject of the book. This would create an effectively random order of books and make it very difficult to find what you are looking for.

Typing 3,500 ISBN numbers into the system didn't sound like fun so I went looking for a good bar code scanner. The first one we tried was the CueCat. The CueCat was manufactured as part of an abandoned marketing scheme. We found one for sale on eBay for five dollars and figure it was worth a try. We couldn't make it work. We spent a few days and couldn't make it scan anything. Other people have said they had some success with it, but we never did.

After our poor experience with the CueCat we decided to go a little higher end and bought a FlicWare scanner. The FlicWare scanner is simple, sturdy, and cost about $100 at that time. (It is now called the Microvision ROV, at $159.00.) There are a lot of other handheld scanners on the market and I can't claim to have made an exhaustive comparison. The FlicWare scanner just seemed simple and had good support from ReaderWare. ReaderWare even provides a PDF file with settings specifically for this scanner. I'm sure there are a lot of other good barcode scanners out there, but this one has worked well for us.

The Bookshelves

With our scanner and catalog in place we needed somewhere to actually put all of the books. We had some bookshelves already, but we were going to need a lot more. The cost of our project up to this point was $140. I was worried that this was where it would start to cost some real money.

The bookshelves were more than just a functional choice. We had to live with them every day. We haven't been in college for a long time. We have a mortgage and own a car. We are adults. Two by fours and cinder blocks just weren't an option. Thos. Moser will sell you a tall solid cherry bookcase for $4,750.00. A bookcase of this size will hold about 180 books.

Luckily HomeDepot came to the rescue. HomeDepot sold us a solid particle board bookcase of the same dimensions for about $30. They don't look too bad either.

Adding the Books

At this point we finally had a catalog, a scanner, and a source for good bookshelves. We were ready to start adding our books to the system. It made sense to shelve the books and catalog them at the same time. We set up one of our new bookcases, the scanner, and a laptop in one room and went to work. The process went like this:

1. Scan about 50 books.
2. Import the books into ReaderWare and let it find the information about them.
3. Manually find LCC numbers for any books which weren't found.
4. Sort the list and add each book to the shelf.

We started this process with one shelf and moved on from there. We kept a clear gap between the cataloged and uncatalogued books. 50 turned out to be about the right number of books to catalog at one time. 50 is a large enough number to make it go quickly, but a small enough number that it is easy to look through the stack of books. We also added a column to ReaderWare to indicate whether a book had been shelved yet. This made it easy to sort our books by LCC number and just add the books that had not yet been shelved. Once we got a little practice the two of us were able to catalog 150-200 books an hour. We didn't do it all at once. We took our time and slowly worked our way through.

Foreign Language, Oversized, and Children's Picture Books

We have a decent number of books in languages other than English (mostly Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and French). These books are often not part of the Library of Congress system. We also have a number of oversized art books. These books need shelves which are especially tall and strong. We kept both of these types of books out of the system. Children's picture books are notorious for going out of print quickly and being difficult to catalog. We kept all of those books out of the system as well since many of them did not have LCC numbers. This accounted for about 200 books.

The Results

At the beginning of this article I identified the following criteria for our system:

1. It needs to be easy to find a book.
2. It needs to be easy to add a book to the system.
3. The systems needs to handle foreign language books.
4. It needs to be easy to maintain the system going forward.
5. The initial cataloging effort can't take forever.

We achieved all of these except for number three. There does not exist (to my knowledge) a system which catalogs all books in all languages. The entirety of human knowledge just isn't that well organized.

We started this process about one year ago. A new baby and life in general got in the way a little, but we have cataloged two out of three floors worth of books. Our current cataloged book count is 1,634. 87 of those books didn't have LCC numbers and are kept on a special shelf. As part of this process we sold, gave away, or recycled about 500 books.

We have designated a shelf as the temporary holding shelf for new books until we get around to adding them to the system. The system has been working very well for us. We know what we have and where to find it, but there has been an added benefit - we can now browse within a subject. When we want to read something new we can go to that section and look at what there is. We can also easily sort the list of books by author or the date we bought them. This makes it much easier to find the book you didn't know you were looking for.

A few statistics:

• Total books - About 3,500
• Sold, given away, or recycled - About 500
• Cataloged - 1,634
• Exempted - about 200
• Total cost of Project - About $440

By the way, if you are curious I estimate that Mary and I have read about 1,300 of our 1,650 cataloged books. About 80 percent. We are actively working on the rest.

Posted by Zack Grossbart at 10:51 AM

You don't

You burn them, or at least the ones which you're unlikely to read again.

Or if that offends you, set them free [bookcrossing.com]...

 

Re:

Or if that offends you, set them free...

Yes for the books that he isn't planning on reading, there are many urban centers that will take them. This guy's collection is large enough for him to consider a loaning system as a public service, if he's the ph

Re:

I have about ~7500 books at home (I have approximately 750 in my home office at the moment) and I know people always want to borrow books. If I had a way to track them, I'd be much happier to lend them out, but of course the article is slashdotted.

What I u

Re:You don't

I have a ginormous amount of books, so I have two problems - one is creating an appropriate space [flickr.com] for them, which I have solved, and the other is cataloging.

For organization, I'm simply using PostgreSQL on the house server, which is hugely fast, completely flexible, and allows me to access everything from the web - so I can just drag a laptop in there, or work on any machine in or out of the house. A few lines of Python and bingo, library system. I may clean it up a little and release it, it could be prettier.

I tried Delicious Library (which I do use for my DVD and CD collections) and a couple of other solutions, but for large libraries, they were all too slow.

Re:

That sounds perfect. I don't suppose you have any idea where one might get one's hands on RFID tags and scanners in bulk? I think one'd have to scan every book's bar code to add it to the database, pair that with an RFID tag and then attach it.

I wonder if

Re:

I think my omnipresent female would hurt me if I tried that. :P

Mine would probably offer to help with the threatening as she tends to be a bit OCD about placement of things like books. Besides, she doesn't get enough time playing with blades in her opinio

Re:You don't

What's the point of reading books if you're not going to keep them for reference? I mean you can't remember everything that's in a book, hell I'm lucky if I can remember 10%. But I do remember what kind of stuff is in a book and roughly where it is, so I can look it up when I need to. I may never read a book from cover to cover twice, but there's still a lot of knowledge to be had by keeping it around.

Re:

There are other books than reference ones, you know. Like, for example, novels.

If you read a book just for entertainment, there's no point in keeping it around once you know how it ends (unless it's really a classic that you want to keep for quoting passag

Re:You don't

Following your logic there's no reason to ever buy movies either, because, hey you already know how its going to end. Now assuming you'll never read the book again then I guess there isn't much point to keeping it (aside from lending out books to friends and so on) but lots of people reread novels, and not just the ones that are worth quoting from. For the same reason that people like to rewatch old movies that they have enjoyed, rereading an old book years later, even if it wasn't some masterpiece can be quite enjoyable. In the worst case scenario rereading old novels you enjoyed is a better use of your time than watching mediocre reruns on TV.

easier

Meh, I just married a librarian instead.

Re:

wife...? what is this 'wife' that you speak of

Re:easier

wife...? what is this 'wife' that you speak of

Wife is a slightly different version of the same product as Girlfriend.

It comes with some more restrictive licensing, and there's a little bit of vendor lock in, but some people don't object.

Opinions seem to be mixed on if you should stick with Girlfriend, but it largely depends on your needs and long-term plans. Many people who add the add-on package Child 1.0 end up going this route, but it's not mandatory.

It's got higher maintenance costs than Girlfriend, but has some features not found in that package as well, so it's a trade off.

Sometimes upgrading a version of Girlfriend can have a steep learning curve, as they tend to randomly change features with each major version, so you should really determine if your current version of Girlfriend meets your needs before you upgrade.

YMMV.

Cheers

Re:easier

Having both Wife and Girlfriend installed may cause serious problems. Although some people have reported long term success, there have been no definitive studies.

Re:

George Bush reads slashdot? It's a lie!

Library problem unsolved: Add kids

...they'll scramble the system if it does not make sense to them.

We have approx 3000 books in the house as well as two kids. Dewey-ish classification works fine for us, splitting the books into groups according to their Dewey hundreds (0-99.999, 100-1999.999,...). However we have had to break out some special sections. Robots, programming and electronics have a special area together (breaking Dewey boundaries). All the fishing related stuff goes together (including studies of aquatic instects etc). All the craft books go together (well Dewey does that anyway).

No computer needed.

Re:Library problem unsolved: Add kids

whatever you do, DO NOT LET THE ROBOTS NEAR THE CRAFT BOOKS!

I happened to me once, I still have the scars.

Organise?

I have boxes of books in the basement, shelves of books upstairs, stacks of books in th edining room, CDs, DVDs, tapes, records, all over the place.

I solved the problem by ignoring it.

-mcgrew [slashdot.org]

Microvision's software as an alternative?

The same company which currently sell the hand bar code scanner that was mentioned in the article, Microvision, appear to have software just for cataloging books, CDs, DVDs, and anything scannable with a bar code. It didn't state that it could do book org

You don't...

If the RIAA has their way, making available copyrighted works to people other than the purchaser will be considered copyright infringement. You don't want to get sued by the books publishers, do you?

Then don't create a library. It's that simple.

Re:

If the NY Times could figure out a system by which they'd know who is reading which copy of their newspaper, who is peeking over shoulders to read it and who hands it to someone else, they'd use that system to charge everyone who takes a look at their prop

Re:

What's fair about someone else having a say in how often I do something that doesn't affect them in the least? If they want to keep what they've done private, I have no problem with that. Once they release it into the wild, for whatever reason, they have

Pictures?!

I remember reading your original post and found it intriguing, great to see some feedback after it's all said and done. Anyways, I would love to see some pictures! I skimmed through your write up and found many of it interesting (I'll read it completely

Takes All the fun out of it

Now you can see an Ask Slashdot question with a definitive answer

That takes all the fun out of it, especially for legal questions.

Example:
Q: Someone is taking credit for my code. What legal recourse do I have?

A1: IANAL, but I'm pretty sure you can kill him for that and call it self defense. It totally won't be murder.
A2: IANAL, but I'm pretty sure you can take his eye for it. Eye for a piece of code or something like that...
A3: IANAL, but I'm pretty sure you're entitled to their wife and the profits from selling his children into slavery.
A4: I AM a lawyer, and depending on how you licensed your code ... blah blah (bunch of legalese) blah... and that's what you are legally entitled to do.

The experience of an ask slashdot is going down the list of answers, plugging and checking. Surviving long enough to use the one by the actual lawyer is so rewarding. I tell you, I want stand for any sort definitive answer to an ask slashdot.

Most importantly...

...you didn't answer any questions about this "wife" artifact you're dealing with while catalogging books. Could you please give us more details?

Oh, painful memory

...of my ex-daughter-in-law, who decided to surprise me for my birthday by reorganizing my (3500) books:

By height.

rj

Re:

Sorry, Slashdot deleted the less-than sign in front of "3500".

Just to clarify

Do you mean "ex-daughter-in-law" or should that say "late daughter-in-law"?

I solved this problem.

My solution was "marry a librarian". Worked very well for me, you might consider trying it.

Dead tree format is dead

I stopped using dead-tree books years ago, first I used a Palm III and later I switched to a Sony Clie TH-55. A lot of people are skeptical about e-books, saying it is uncomfortable reading from a screen but my experience is that the exact opposite is true

Re:

There are disadvantages, too though.

• You don't have a proper appreciation of how much or how little you are reading. Some people might think it's a plus, but other people need to manage their time more carefully.
• It's not as easy to take notes in e-books

Re:Dead tree format is dead

Electronic books still suck. They are device dependent and most importantly, DRM-encrusted.

A friend of mine can come over and borrow one of my ~1,500 real books.

They cannot do that with an e-book. They cannot transfer one of my "e-books" to their reader. I guess publishers want everyone that reads a book to pay? Hmmm. Am I the only one that has ever borrowed a book?

I personally was never into vampire books until my dad gave me a book of his to read. Guess what, since reading the one borrowed book, I bought about 12 vampire books.

Lending books without restrictions creates more profit. End of story. My aunt is big on classic works, works in the public domain. After she lent me two books, I paid for copies of several books that I can download free since they are in the public domain.

I am not trolling, e-books currently suck. The readers are crap, sorry kindle-fans, and the DRM/lock-down is not acceptable to avid readers. When an electronic book comes along that I can lend to a friend without it being tracked, then I might consider it. For now, I still want a physical book. I can lend out a physical book without some book company tracking it or putting a time limit on it.

Date a Librarian

That's what I do. And her BS is in Computer Science, so win-win. Except for all the emacs versus vim arguments. Gah! So many years of schooling, and she can't understand that vim is superior?

Delicious Library + shelf labels

I was facing a similar, but somewhat smaller problem (~1600 books) and worked out a solution using delicious monster. First off I segregated my hardcovers and paperbacks info fiction and non-fiction sections, then scanned them all into Delicious Library, a

Burn them

Burn them to a DVD.

Next.

Seriously I haven't read a paper book cover to cover since I was 17 or so (10 years ago). Have read many multi-hundred page PDFs though.

Why is this tagged richbastard?

Seriously, what the hell?

Doesn't everyone here have a hobby or two they spend a fair bit of money on? Perhaps it's your computer gear, maybe it's model airplanes, maybe it's your car or your audio system. Last I checked, an awful lot of geeks had a particular hobby they enjoyed and spent money on, and they don't have to be 'rich bastards' to do so. They just have to value enjoying themselves over... What? Hording money? So this man's hobby is reading and his library, and he enjoys organizing it in a creative way.

Sheesh.

Re: Why is this tagged richbastard?

To elaborate on the parent comment, they probably haven't spent all that much anyway, especially if they've been collecting books for more than 20 years; even if each book costs about $10 in today's dollars, that's about $1750 per year over 20 years, or ab

I was sure the answer was going to be...

sell your books and buy a Kindle.

Interesting reading.

Hi, it was an overall interesting reading with some entertaining bits. I realized that you settled for a closed source sollution for this one. I am sure there must be some Open Source software which you could use to solve your problem (one of the many alon

Not a rich bastard

Someone tagged this rich bastard, but I don't think that's extreme at all. I've kept nearly every book I've ever bought in my life, and I probably have around 800. And I'm only 21 years old (thankfully my parents have an empty garage and I was reading from age 2). Depending on the submitter's age and if he/she is married to another book lover it would be very easy to get to that number.

This is slashdot, right? As in news for nerds. Do nerds no longer enjoy reading?

Our system

We are only around 500-600 books right now, so admittedly it's a smaller issue than 3500, but Delicious Library software combined with what the submitter calls "soft alphabetizing" has worked well for us. We split fiction from non-fiction, then split non-fiction into sub categories. My wife and I each have a handful of categories that we are very interested in, so a dozen sub-categories combined with a general non-fiction catch-all makes most books easy to find. In fact, the only reason we use the software catalog is so we can loan out books to friends and family. What's the point of keeping hundreds or thousands of books, if they go unused? People are always borrowing books (and movies) and we don't have to worry about losing them. Or at least we know whose thumbs to break if the books don't come back.

Thank you!

It's nice to see someone actually follow up on an Ask Slashdot question and share the end result.

Re:

Except he excluded DDS explicitly, because it was difficult to subcategorize-and-sort below the general ABC.XYZ Dewey number.

Re:

I'd try reading their article(wasn't slashdotted for me); they specifically address that they considered the Dewey Decimal System and point out the problems they had with it.

Of course, I have enough books to practically count as another 4" of insulation ar

Re:

I find the secret is to lay them spine-down in the attic. Helps immeasurably with heating and cooling costs.

Re:

" I find the secret is to lay them spine-down in the attic. Helps immeasurably with heating and cooling costs."

... and don't forget to apply for a carbon tax credit for all the carbon sequestered in those dead trees!

Re:

There's more to cataloging books than just finding them. We've probably got only a couple thousand, but my wife catalogs them using LibraryThing [librarything.com] and also stores them in a local file. To my knowledge, we've never used either to find a book in our house, but

Re:

I have quite a few books myself and I'm contemplating doing exactly this (except for about 50 books that are rare, super-expensive or used often).

As long as we're making value judgments for strangers, here's my suggestion for you: why don't you sell those

Re:Why do you _need_ 3500 books?

Why not donate, say, 3400 of them that you will never read again to a local public library? I have quite a few books myself and I'm contemplating doing exactly this (except for about 50 books that are rare, super-expensive or used often).

And as a public librarian, I strongly suggest that you ASK your librarian before you do this. If you show up at my library with that number of books, I will probably attempt to make you eat them.

Here's a previous Slashdot comment I made regarding how different public libraries handle donations differently and how they may be either a boon or a burden [slashdot.org], depending on the library.

Finally, if he enjoys having 3500 books and his family and friends use them, why shouldn't he have them?