Can you imagine anything worse?

They say one should not be too quick to judge, but when one is regularly surrounded by thousands and thousands of books such advice is untenable. My interest is piqued over some title at the library dozens upon dozens of times every day that I work. I can't sit down to an hour of careful consideration for each of these titles. I have to design careful analytical tools to discard or keep these books in as little time as possible. I have had to learn to be an extremely efficient judge of books.

I'm not going to go into my full panoply of techniques in this particular post. I just wanted to share with you my starting one:

One second buys two, and two seconds buys ten.

I used this method just this afternoon while shelving in non fiction. I was working with cookbooks and came across a nice looking one. It was called something like Homemade Foods to Make and Give. That was one second of interesting right there, and it bought two. So I randomly opened the book. There was a picture of something all wrapped up in crafty papers and a recipe title: Zucchini Mustard Tea Bread.

It did not buy ten more seconds.