You've signed up. You've logged in. You're staring at an empty library with the quiet determination of someone who has decided to catalog their books and will not be talked out of it.
Good. Let's add your first book.
The Add Book Page
Click Add Book from the navigation. You'll arrive at a form with more fields than your first apartment had rooms. Don't panic. You don't need to fill in all of them. You don't even need to fill in most of them.
Here's what actually matters for your first entry:
The essentials:
- Title — as it appears on the title page, not the spine or cover
- Author — in "Last, First" format (e.g., "Tolkien, J.R.R.")
- ISBN — if the book has one (many older books don't, and that's fine)
The strongly encouraged:
- Publisher and Publication Year — helps identify the exact edition
- Condition — even a rough grade is better than nothing
- Edition — "First edition," "3rd revised edition," etc.
The everything else: Leave it. Come back to it. Use Enrich Mode later to fill in what you missed. The goal right now is to get the book into the system, not to produce a museum-grade catalog entry on your first try.
Two things that help while you're filling in forms: every field has a small ⓘ icon next to its label. Hover over it (or tap on mobile) to see an antiquarian-trade-perspective explanation of what the field means and why it matters. These aren't generic tooltips — they're written by someone who catalogs rare books, not someone who writes software documentation.
And once your book is saved, you can upload photographs in the Images section of the edit page. Each image gets a label from 51 book part types (title page, frontispiece, binding detail, damage — the full list). Labels help buyers, insurers, and future-you understand what each photograph shows. See Photographing Your Books for the complete guide.
The "Last, First" Convention
Shelvd uses the cataloging standard of "Last, First" for contributor names. This means:
- J.R.R. Tolkien becomes Tolkien, J.R.R.
- Gabriel García Márquez becomes García Márquez, Gabriel
- Erasmus stays Erasmus (single names are fine)
Why? Because it's how libraries sort. It's how catalogs are searched. And it means your 500 books by authors whose surnames start with "S" will actually be findable.
If you type a name the wrong way around, Shelvd will do its best to fix it. But it appreciates the courtesy.
Saving Your First Book
Hit Save. Your book appears in your Library collection. It has a record. It exists. It may be incomplete — the pagination might be missing, the binding type might be blank, the condition notes might say nothing at all — but it's cataloged.
And here's the thing: an incomplete record is infinitely better than no record. You can always come back. You can always enrich. You can always add that one field you forgot at 11 PM on a Tuesday.
What to Do Next
Now that your first book is in, you have options:
- Add another book manually — repeat the process, get faster each time
- Try Library Lookup — let one of 26 library catalogs do the typing for you
- Import from Excel — if you already have a spreadsheet (we know you do)
- Enrich your record — open the edit page, click Enrich, and pull in metadata from the world's libraries
Your first book is wrong because it's incomplete. That's not a bug — it's a starting point. The catalog gets better every time you touch it. That's the whole idea.
Welcome to Shelvd. Your shelves are no longer lying to you.
📖 Related on the blog: Your Bookshelf Is Lying to You, Cataloging on a Sunday