Vitrina
A shelf read by its spines
Overview
Vitrina stands a collection of Spanish-language science fiction paperbacks on a
shelf built from their real spine scans. Each book is rendered at the height its
catalogue record gives in centimetres, and the width comes from the scan's own
aspect ratio, so a row comes out as uneven as the shelf it was photographed
from. Click a spine and the book turns around: cover, imprint, translator, cover
artist, table of contents.
It exists because the covers of the Ediciones B lines of the late 1980s and
1990s are hard to find anywhere else. La Tercera Fundación scanned them,
and this is a way to stand in front of them.
Live: vitrina.neorgon.com
Features
- Spines at true proportions -- height from the book's real dimensions,
width from the scan's aspect ratio, so no two look alike
- A drawn spine when there is no scan -- flat and lettered, never passing
for the real thing, so the shelf stays complete and honest
- Three views -- the shelf, a cover gallery, and the catalogue to browse
- Group and order -- by your own shelf labels, by the catalogue's
collection, by author, series or decade; ordered by collection number, which
is how they would actually stand
- A real shelf to look at first --
/demo/ shows a real collection
read-only, so the finished thing is visible before you start your own at
/shelf/, which begins empty
- The whole collection -- one toggle draws every catalogued volume of each
collection you own from, your books lit and the rest dimmed, so Nova reads as
13 of 365 rather than 13. Click a dimmed one to put it on the shelf
- Gaps in your series -- volumes the catalogue numbers in a series you
already collect, one click from the shelf
- Add from the catalogue -- 774 records across the five collections this
shelf touches, each arriving with its cover and spine
- Add by hand -- for a book no catalogue has, with your own image URLs
- Shelf report -- how many centimetres of shelf, which authors, which
editions have no spine scan
- Your browser or your account -- signed out, the shelf stays in this
browser; sign in with a Neorgon account and it is kept in your account, on
every device you sign in on. Nothing is public unless you publish it
- This browser's books, moved when you say -- signing in never moves them by
itself: the page offers to add them to your account and fill in the notes and
labels it lacks, then to clear this browser's copy of what the account holds in
full
- Shared shelves at
/u/?handle -- reserve your shelf's address from Share
now. Publishing opens later, and until then nobody else can see any shelf. A
published shelf shows its address, its catalogue books and your shelf labels,
never notes, dates or books added by hand
- Delete my Vitrina data -- in Share, with an export offered first; the
address is then held for 30 days so nobody else can take it
- Export and import -- the shelf exports to JSON and imports back; into an
account, an import only adds books and never removes one
Keyboard
| Key | Does |
|---|
1 2 3 | Shelf, Covers, Browse |
/ | Focus the search box |
a | Add a book |
← → | Walk along the row with a book open |
Esc | Close the drawer or dialog |
Where the data comes from
La Tercera Fundación is a volunteer catalogue of Spanish-language science
fiction, and it has no public API, so scripts/scrape.py reads it: one request
every 1.2 seconds, a descriptive User-Agent, and an on-disk cache so a re-run
costs nothing. robots.txt allows crawlers in general and disallows ClaudeBot,
so the owner runs it and a Claude session never does.
Images are hotlinked, apart from small thumbnails of the shelf's own books.
The catalogue serves them from Cloudflare with a one-year cache header and no
hotlink protection, so the only cover art in this repo is assets/thumbs/,
described below. Otherwise it carries bibliographic facts only: titles, authors,
imprints, ISBNs, formats, page counts, tables of contents. Back cover copy is
deliberately not stored; the drawer links to the record instead.
python3 scripts/scrape.py resolve # my list -> candidate editions
python3 scripts/scrape.py detail # picked editions -> data/library.json
python3 scripts/scrape.py catalog # the collections my books live in
python3 scripts/scrape.py spines # which editions have a scanned spine
python3 scripts/scrape.py cache-images # local fallback copies
python3 scripts/scrape.py cache-images --catalog # ...for every browsable record
python3 scripts/thumbs.py # WebP thumbnails of your own books
This is the beginning of the README. Read the rest at the original. Read the full README ↗
