#If someone spells their name Hsin and it's spelled that way ON THE BOOK COVER i do not give a flying fuck about correct pinyin

[softgrungeprophet]

okay just for reference

1. A leading "The" or "A(n)" should not be counted when Alphabetizing and especially not when shelving, considering your spine stickers shouldn't even include articles in the leading position. A Knight's Tale should be under K -- Knight's Tale, A -- rather than bulking up your A section with an endless throng of confusingly organized titles. This applies to more than just books btw.

2. after the first word, all words are counted as part of alphabetization (... I don't remember if this is still true following a colon/in a subtitle, or with in/definite articles, so maybe look that up or ask a librarian lol -- it is true of conjunctions and prepositions though)

3. Numerals (0-9) come before letters. Spelled-out numbers, I've seen mixed approaches and I don't have useful advice. Maybe look up ALA guidelines or something. And the number of a book in a series is more important than the subtitle for fuck's sake-- don't sort numbered books in a series by their subtitles (unless it's a book with a sub-series title such as a spinoff of a main series, like Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, though I would argue that's just the full title anyway, not a subtitle)

The various Warriors series in juvenile fiction really seemed to confuse the other pages on this front, and don't even get me started on Rainbow Fairies 😭

4. Also I feel like this should go without saying but punctuation is not counted. Do not include a title's comma or quotation marks as an element in your alphabetization scheme unless it is the word "comma" spelled out lol

Now, technically spaces are counted as a character that comes before all other numerals and letters, and I'm sure there's a reason, but if your goal is easy sortability and browsing on the consumer end, I honestly think that's kinda stupid and will probably confuse people so unless you're working at like... the library of congress, or in the actual databases, i doubt it matters (at least in terms of manual shelving or browsing; like imo as a reader and ex library page, A B C, ABC and A.B.C. are the same to me and the first one getting special treatment seems weird?? Like i said there's probably a reason but as far as actual user end stuff it seems impractical)

Also I do think that Dewey Decimal falls short for shelving American comic books at libraries since it prioritizes author name rather than title, but alas it's used anyway. I find that sometimes bookstores do a better job with western comics here. Manga, at least, is pretty easy. At home I sort my American comics by series, number and chronology though, not author name.

Bonus:

Dear librarians, I love you, but: Please learn how multi-part surnames work. Guillermo del Toro's surname is not "Toro," it is "del Toro." (This is something I had to bring to a librarian to have fixed more than once)

And some advice to book publishers:

Please for the love of God hire a librarian or someone with a library science degree who knows about things like databases and title sorting. Oh my God. Honestly anyone with a website that involves tagging please for the love of god hire someone who knows literally anything about metadata and booleans

AND

As always

Take what I say with a forgetful grain of salt. If you actually need to know something for sorting purposes, look it up or ask a professional.