3

There are various ways to order/group books in a library.

  • By author, in alphabetical order
  • By size
  • By category etc.

Concerning 3) we might have the following names in Latin. They might be opera...

  • linguistica
  • historica
  • geographica
  • religiosa
  • philosophica
  • medica
  • litteraria
    and of course all kinds of conceivable subcategories.

But what about

  • cookbooks
  • do-it-yourself / handicraft guides
  • travel guides (itinerarium might be a good candidate, but would e.g. Lonely Planet count as one? According to this entry it is an account, not an exhaustive guide of useful travel information)
  • belles-lettres, "a label for literary works that do not fall into the major categories such as fiction, poetry, or drama" (quote from Wikipedia).
  • comic books (Asterix Gallus et al.) [Edit: I just thought of delineata, analogous to the way map publishers like Blaeu would mention the people who drew the map: "X delineavit"]
JobRozemond
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    This is an interesting question! Would it make sense to split it up and ask about each genre separately? That way each one would get proper attention. – Joonas Ilmavirta Jan 30 '21 at 16:24

2 Answers2

6

Apicius provides us De re coquinaria, so a form of that probably works.

Do-It-Yourself guides would fall under the technical genre, which I don't believe the ancients ever fully labeled, but we could perhaps use the Greek didactica, from which we get the English "didactic."

Travel guides were already a thing in antiquity. Strabo's was simply called Geographica, but a little bit later we do see itineraria that could theoretically be used. The latter were more travelogues (M-W def. 1), though.

Belles-lettres isn't really a genre, but a meta-category of different genres.

Comics would be harder to think up, because there was no such ancient analogue. The one thing I can think of is that embroidered images were called picturae textiles, so perhaps something with pict-. Could be something as simple as opera picta, but since it didn't exist back then, who knows what term the Romans would have used?

cmw
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3

For handicraft, perhaps daedalea or daedala would be fun:

  1. Daedălēus, a, um, adj., Daedalian, relating to Daedalus:
    (a). Daedălēo Icaro, Hor. Od. 2, 20, 13: "Ope Daedălēa", id. ib. 4, 2, 2.—
    (b). Daedalĕum iter (i. e. through the labyrinth), Prop. 2, 14, 8 (3, 6, 8 M.).—
  2. Daedălĭcus, a, um, adj., skilful: manus, Venant. 10, 11, 17.—
Cerberus
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