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How are fiction books such as novels sorted on the shelves at Japanese
bookshops? Kana order seems to play a small part but not the whole part.

(I'm not asking about nonfiction books since those are ordered by category and
are much easier to find)
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2011-06-14T02:20:42.730
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question
culture kana
Are bookshelves in alphabetical (kana) order in Japanese bookshops and libraries?
I haven't been to a Japanese library yet, but judging from the book shops I
have been to so far, fiction and such have been sorted by publishing house
(such as Kadokawa or DC Comics).
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2011-06-14T07:31:15.427
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From what I've observed, it varies from shop to shop:

  * by publisher -> by author name -> by book title
  * by author name -> by book title
  * by library -> by series number (In case of 文庫 [ぶんこ] (library), 新書 [しんしょ] (library of pocket-sized paperbacks)
  * by relevance/context (in untraditional bookstores like [ヴィレッジ・ヴァンガード](http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%B4%E3%82%A3%E3%83%AC%E3%83%83%E3%82%B8%E3%83%B4%E3%82%A1%E3%83%B3%E3%82%AC%E3%83%BC%E3%83%89_\(%E6%9B%B8%E7%B1%8D%E3%83%BB%E9%9B%91%E8%B2%A8%E5%BA%97\)), [松丸本舗](http://www.maruzen.co.jp/shopinfo/matsumaru/) [まつまるほんぽ])

Also, 文庫 and 新書 are placed in separate bookshelves on their own.

As for libraries, most of them follow the [NDC classification
system](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nippon_Decimal_Classification). NDC
stands for Nippon Decimal Classification.

If you go to a library, you'll see that books are labelled with NDC
classification number (分類番号 [ぶんるいばんごう]), a letter or two denoting the Kana to
be used for further ordering1 (図書記号 [としょきごう] / 著者記号 [ちょしゃきごう]) and an optional
series number (巻冊記号 [かんさつきごう]). These numbers are called 請求記号 [せいきゅうきごう] as a
set and is used for ordering books and tracking down a book to a specific
location in the library2 3:

```

    +-------+
    | 810.4 | - 分類番号              +
    +-------+                        |
    |  イ   | - 図書記号/著者記号       +-> 請求記号
    +-------+                        |
    |   2   | - 巻冊記号              +
    +-------+
    
```

Here's how it looks like (notice the small white labels at the bottom of the
spine):

![Fukuoka City Public Library](https://i.stack.imgur.com/O1tTK.jpg)

([Photo by LWY](http://www.flickr.com/photos/lwy/2201154175/in/photostream/))

For fiction books, they fall under the main class of 9, and further classified
like:

```

    9 - Literature
     900 - Literature
     910 - Japanese Literature
       911 - Poetry
       912 - Plays
       913 - Novels
       ...
     920 - Chinese Literature
     ...
    
```

Again, 文庫 and 新書 will be in separate bookshelves in libraries too, and can be
ordered by library -> by series number instead of NDC.

[1] Usually the first letter of the primary author's surname, or the book
title when there are a lot of authors.  
[2] Some libraries may have an internal tracking number of their own, in
addition to / in place of NDC, especially the small, private or academic ones.  
[3] This sounds all neat and ordered, but 請求記号 isn't portable across different
libraries, because they have different ideas about how to format it and what
to use for 図書記号.
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2011-06-30T03:17:09.377
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answer