Tom, here's a suggestion.
Over half of all tailor BODs are cloth
Over half of all smith BODs are iron
put a bag or backpack into your pack, open it, put one of the books you are sorting out of in it, and two empties.
You'll now have your main pack open, and the pack inside it open. Put them side by side.
Rename one of the empty books "iron" the other "cloth"
Open the book to be sorted, go into the filter, select "your filter", and first select "Iron"
This will only show the iron BODs.
Drop ALL of them out of the book, into your backpack, until you run out of room or run out of iron bods.
Since the other pack is open, start dragging the dropped BODs onto the "iron" BOD book.
If there are still iron BODs in the book being sorted, go back and drop them, until none left in the original book.
Now, go into the filter of the original book, and choose "cloth"
Drop all the cloth BODs out, and move them into the cloth book. Repeat as necessary.
Now that you've gotten the iron & cloth out of that book, set it aside in a container in your home, and get the next book needing sorting. Since you're already set for cloth BODs, do them, then switch to pulling out iron BODs as the second step.
Repeat as necessary, until the cloth & iron books become too full to allow you to bring other books into your pack, or to drop out very many BODs.
Then, you'll have to set one or the other out, when sorting into one of them.
After you've done that for all those BOD Bookss (getting new books if you hit 500 BODs in a book), get two empties, and start sorting the now-much-emptier books for Spined and Dull Copper, in the same manner. Then, Shadow and Horned, then Copper & barbed. From Bronze on up you can start sorting into all the remaining metal types at the same time,as it's likely that several of the books will have no verite or valorite BODs.
