Music Collection Progress Report

Several months ago I started on the humungous task of indexing my numerous music books. Well, maybe indexing is too strong a word since all I'm doing is making a database of each book with the songs that are in that book. In other words, I'm not trying to track the songs by page number or type of song or author or anything really worthwhile. But I figure with this minimal index I'll be able to answer the question "Do you have Blank blank blank blank?" with a yes or no and even have some idea of what book to look for. Before this index all I could say was, "I think I do because I remember playing it but I have no idea where it might be."

I figure I'm about a third the way through my various music books but 90% the way through the "variety" type of music books - you know, the "100 best tunes in the world", "the 50 songs you catch yourself whistling" -- those type of books. The remaining ones are like the South Pacific or Pajama Game books. If a song is from a Broadway musical or movie it will likely be in one of those types of books. Anyway, I thought I would give a brief summary of where I am in this project.

So far I have scanned and input the table of contents from 49 books containing a total of 4,871 song titles. That makes an average of 99 titles per book, an average that is tremendously skewed by books such as the 1,001 Jumbo Book of Songs which coincidently has 1,001 song titles in it. One song is represented in 7 different song books. Can you guess which one? "What the World Needs Now Is Love, Sweet Love" Another song title comes up 7 times but I really don't think it's the same song seven times. That title is "Something".
I won't list the rest of the duplicated songs but there are
8 appearing 6 times
17 appearing 5 times
50 appearing 4 times
143 appearing 3 times
435 appearing 2 times
3,883 appearing only once.

I know, I'm probably the only one finding that interesting. Stay tuned for more exciting numbers from music.