Every first edition, paperback and signed copy, tracked and sorted.
A private catalogue of the copies on your shelves — author, edition, the year it was printed, its condition, what you paid, and the photograph of the inscription that makes it yours.
Pull a card, read the copy
Invisible Cities
Italo CalvinoLent in 2023 to someone whose name arrives slowly. The notes on the copy say who it was, which is more than you can.
- Kind
- Hardback
- Edition
- 1st US · 1st printing
- Published
- 1974
- Condition
- Very good
- Paid
- £34 · May 2016
- Collection
- Fiction
Seven cards, filed in order
- Card 015 sec
Scan the ISBN
Point the phone at the barcode, type the ISBN, or search by author and title. Author, title, year, binding, language and cover fill in from Open Library, and you check them before saving.
- Card 0230 sec
Name the copy, not the title
Then the edition and the printing from the copyright page, so a first printing and a book club reissue are two cards rather than one.
- Card 0310 sec
Grade it on the trade's scale
As new down to Poor, the words a dealer uses, explained further down. The same grade means the same thing on every card.
- Card 041 min
Photograph the jacket and the flaws
Up to five photographs a copy: jacket, spine, the price on the flap, the inscription. Dated evidence, taken before a loss rather than after it.
- Card 052 min
Bring the old list
Upload the spreadsheet you already keep as a CSV and match its columns to the fields. Each row becomes a card.
- Card 061 link
Lend a list, not the books
A read-only link to one collection, all your books or the whole account, for a friend or a reading group. What you paid stays off it, and the link stops working when you remove it.
- Card 071 click
Print the shelf, or take it with you
Every copy in a collection, its condition, what you paid and a photo, as one PDF for an insurer or a police report. Or a CSV of every field, or a zip of the whole account with the original photographs.
The trade's ladder, plainly
Very good
Read and kept well. Slight wear at the edges, a little rubbing to the jacket, no tears, the text clean throughout.
What a card holds
- Author and title
- Kind
- Genres
- Language
- Edition
- Published
- ISBN
- Condition
- Purchase price
- Purchase date
- Photographs
- Receipts
- Notes
- Collection
Colophon
Why we built itThe shelves stop being a library at around four hundred books. After that they are a storage system nobody documented: two copies of the same novel in different translations, a paperback you are certain you lent to someone whose name will not come, and a signed first that is worth eleven times what you paid and is currently holding up a plant.
A title is not a copy. First printing or fourth, jacket or none, price-clipped or not, inscribed to you or to a stranger in 1971 — these are the differences between a book worth twelve and the same book worth twelve hundred. A list of titles is the one thing that cannot tell you which you have.
So stashu catalogues copies. Author and title, the edition and the year it was printed, the ISBN where there is one, a grade on the trade's scale, photographs of the jacket and the inscription, what you paid and when, and the collection it belongs to.
Then, when a pipe bursts or a flat is emptied, it prints the whole shelf as a document an adjuster can work from. No feed, no followers, no reading challenge — just an accurate, private, faintly obsessive account of the stacks.
Start with the shelf you'd grab in a fire
Free, unlimited books. Scan the first ISBN, or bring the list you already keep.