Wednesday, September 17, 2008

Talking amongst your shelves
A novel way to organise your books is to use different titles to spell out new phrases

Multi-story reading ... detail from the cover of The Book on the Bookshelf, by Henry Petroski

We all know by now that your bookshelf speaks volumes about you … but what about when your bookshelf starts speaking to you? Not the ravings of a conspiracy theorist, but a new way of cracking the old nut of how exactly to organise your book collection.

Bibliophiles have tried alphabetical by author, by title, by publisher, by genre, by size … Sarah Crown covered 'em all in her Guardian blog of 2006.
But the latest book organisation method making them all Dewey-eyed on the internet is to sort them so the titles form a (fairly) coherent sentence, phrase or message.The Sorted Book Project is the brainchild of multi-media artist Nina Katchadourian, who says she has been "grouping the books into clusters so that the titles can be read in sequence" since 1993.
It's been a slow-burner, but in recent months its been taken up by various bloggers and many of the results can now be seen on the photo sharing site Flickr.
Read the full Guardian piece here.

1 comment:

Amber said...

A librarian friend of mine keeps two books shelved together: the first title is "Three Little Words"; the next, "Suck It Up".