Locating Shakespeare at Trexler Library

Since Trexler Library holds about 40 shelves packed full of works by and about Shakespeare, to actually locate the individual title you are looking for will require more numbers… namely, Cutter numbers (i.e. the line after the Dewey number, beginning with a letter.)  

The amount of scholarly work about Shakespeare is so great that we have chosen to “double Cutter” within this class, so there will commonly be 2 lines below the 822.33 Dewey number.  

• The first reflects the general subject within 822.33; 
• the second differentiates the book by author and/or title.  

An example follows:

Title: Shakespeare without women : representing gender and race by Dympna Callaghan.
Dewey number    822.33    =    ‘Shakespeare’    
First Cutter           A42    =    Subject: Relationships / gender / sexuality / race    
Second Cutter     C156s    =    Author: Callaghan (C156) + first letter of title (s) 

The first Cutter number is either:

1. a specific number for each work (Hamlet is H2, for example) or
2. a Cutter number for a specific subject of Shakespeare study: bibliography, biography, general criticism, “special subjects”, etc, as well as “complete works” and “partial collections”.  See the next page for a complete list of all the Cutter numbers used for Shakespeare.

The second Cutter number then reflects the author and/or title of the individual book, and works more or less the same as other Cutter numbers in the Library.

Note that in general books should NOT be cuttered on "Shakespeare" (S527) either as author or as a title.  In the first case, the Dewey number 822.33 already means "Shakespeare", so the cutter would be redundant.  In the second case, there are way too many books on the bard with the title beginning "Shakespeare and..." which would get us right back to a problem with making the book numbers unique.