At the booksale, Gus buys three medical biographies and a cookbook, which means he has to rearrange his bookshelves to make room for them. First he moves the detective stories. Then he moves the music books to the shelf for detective stories, but there aren't all that many music books so he moves the art books as well, making the shelf almost too full, but it'll have to do until he has more time.

Shawn watches the process from the couch and sighs. "Can't you just alphabetize your books like a reasonably anal person?"

"They are alphabetized," Gus points out. "They're categorized, then alphabetized according to author, and then according to title. I don't just alphabetize them, because categorization is a superior sorting method. Alphabetization as a single sorting process should only be used for items that all belong to the same category."

Shawn groans and buries his head in the couch.

Gus is very particular about sorting methods. In fact, he has found alphabetization to be an adequate method of sorting only for the following:

Spices

Gus's spice collection starts with arrow root and ends with white pepper. Some of the jars may be underused to the point where he seriously considers throwing them in the trash, but until then they have their given place and should not be moved elsewhere.

Shawn, of course, does move them elsewhere. First he simply moved them around on the shelf, which would have meant disaster for Gus's late-night supper if the supersniffer hadn't told him he was about to pour cinnamon into his pasta sauce.

Nowadays Gus looks at the jars, just to make sure, which means Shawn has taken to hiding them entirely, even once making beds for them in the cutlery drawer. Gus always finds them, of course, and always puts them back.

Clients

Admittedly, clients don't all belong to the same category, and thus could be sorted in more complicated ways, but Gus doesn't have Shawn's memory, and so he chooses to simply alphabetize them. He does make sure to have indicators for date and crime in the registry as well, though, so that he can search for all three subjects if he has to.

Shawn hasn't complained – but Gus isn't sure Shawn is even aware that they emhave/em a registry.

Pens

Gus has three sorts of pens: the fancy kind only used to sign important papers, the everyday, useable kind, and conference pens that run out of ink after a few days of use but that he keeps around as memorabilia. The latter kind are the ones he keeps alphabetized, in special pencil cases. He picks up pens at every doctor's office he goes to, at supermarkets where he participates in the various surveys offered by the store, and nowadays even at crime scenes. He has an American Duo pen, a Monarch Lodge pen, a Santa Barbara Comic-Con pen, and many more - including an Old Sonora pen, which is a historically inaccurate ballpoint pen masquerading as a historically accurate dip pen.

A few months ago, after one of his rounds, something caught his eye as he was putting away a Carpinteria Clinic pen in the A-C pencil case. He fished out an unfamiliar pen, much too valuable for this particular collection, and with a name in silver letters: Carlton Lassiter.

Shawn feigned ignorance at first, but later admitted to nicking the pen. A gift, he called it, and Gus lectured him about how wrong it is to steal a gift, as well as how wrong it is to alphabetize by first name. But he kept the pen.

When the names of other Santa Barbara police officers start showing up in his pencil cases, he doesn't even argue. He simply sighs and relocates them, wishing Shawn could at least buy a clue about the first name vs. last name issue.

Dinosaur figurines

The dinosaur figurines are not toys; they're scientifically accurate models, and Gus doesn't have to sort them half as often as the other stuff. This could be because he has sorted them according to the Greek alphabet, which may be enough to throw Shawn off his course. Or maybe it's just that every time Shawn starts trying to mess them around, he ends up playing with them instead, and then he's always just bouncing the T-Rex around killing things. Gus finds the re-positioning of fallen dinosaurs to be much less time-consuming than sorting them would be.

Also, Gus has flubbed the order a teensy bit, just to make sure the Tyrannosaurus won't eat the Tylocephale.

Shawn's excuses

The first list Gus made of Shawn's excuses was chronological, but since pretty early on some excuses started being used more than once, that simply wouldn't do. He then tried a categorized list, but the list of categories ended up nearly as long as the list of excuses itself. Finally he has resigned himself to using the simple method of alphabetization. The list is long, detailed, and slightly bitter, and Gus hides it under a series of false names among the pharmaceutical files on his computer. Even so, he's pretty sure Shawn has found it at least once. There is no other explanation for that ludicruous story about an aardvark attack.