PG3476.B78

My love of 053 fields in name authority records is admittedly excessive, possibly irrational, even unnatural, perhaps. For those of you who suffer not from this particular mania, the 053 field contains one or more Library of Congress class numbers, or a range of numbers, associated with the heading, plus any explanatory terms. For individual authors, simply put, it is their number. Of course there are exceptions. Tolstoy and Pushkin have lots of numbers. Nabokov and Brodsky wrote in two different languages, requiring PG (Slavic literature) numbers for their works in Russian, and PS (American literature) numbers for their works in English. But I digress. On a paraprofessional level, when I catalog a work of fiction needing a call number, the presence of the 053 means everything to me. A shining beacon upon which to hang a title cutter. And th-th-th-that's all folks. On a personal level, the number is a jumping off point from which I can browse the stacks of books for just the right title to read. Often found by accident. I wonder how much of my life has been spent loitering around PG3476.A-Z. (Russian literature, individual works, 1917-1960, authors born after 1885.) The correct form of the name is "Bulgakov, Mikhail Afanas'evich, 1891-1940."