Richard Of York Graded Books In Vain

Here we're starting to sort a thousand books by colour, with hue on the horizontal axis (in the traditional rainbow order), and lightness on the vertical. This is a more arbitrary schema than Matt Webb's neuro-landmarking, but it works reasonably well if you're the kind of person who remembers what things look like rather than their exact names.

Some are deliberately mis-sorted, according to memory (or other) association: Lessing's The Sirian Experiments's pink cover has faded to grey on the spine, but pink is what is in the memory, so pink it is; similarly Affectt Marcel is grey but seems to be green. And Red Mars goes in red, though Dark Fiber isn't low down on the shelves. And books being read at the moment are in a small pile outside the shelving, rather than being in the previous big section Should-read-some-of-these-soon section.

There are some problems already. Some books with two strong colours stand out anywhere. Conversely, there's a tendency for a book's distinguishing colour to be camouflaged if it's surrounded by others similarly coloured. A wedge of light grey and silver that doesn't happily sit anywhere in particular; neither do brown books, which fall outside of the two axes somewhat. Over-sized books can forced out of place, or off the shelves entirely. Not having genres is occasionally a pain, but we're still finding books in a minute, so it's mostly working.

This re-sort was inspired by both a friend who sorted her CDs by spine colour, and Chris Cobb's There is Nothing Wrong in This Whole Wide World at the Adobe bookshop in 2004-5.

Elsewhere: The same in homage to Brian Boyer's averaged supermarket aisles. Flickr's rainbow of books pool. A user on LibraryThing is describing books with colour. Egotron's Amazon's top 100 bargain books sorted by colour. On library book collection sort orders. And Chris Cobb interviewed:

I wanted to make something that I didn't think would exist anywhere, and that nobody would ever make, that I couldn't go anywhere in the world and see it. [...] I'm really grateful for the fact that when the bookstore was organized, all of the shelves along the walls are exactly the same. I think there's seven shelves in every unit. So you can estimate the number of books pretty accurately. It's around 20,000 books. Because of how they're positioned, I can map them out and give coordinates for every book. It'll be, like, shelf 3, row 1. Each book will be given its own designation, so that after they're all taken out and rearranged by color, when it comes time to put them back I can just go back to shelf 3, row 1, or whatever, and I'll know exactly where they go.

Comments

[alex laurie]

So now you will be choosing books or editions of books based on the spine colour?

however, very beautiful.

alex

[rodcorp]

The Guardian's Culture Vulture post on book sorting sparks a spirited debate.
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/culturevulture/archives/2005/11/24/case_study.html

[mixed messages]

for Rod!!

I disregard arbitrary visceral interpretations
deliberately, since observing wildly eccentric
readings. Belligerent youth announce many simple
evolutionary nuances determining incidental notions,
guarded yearnings or unifying assumptions. Can any
sense ultimately advance labor metaphorae? Eventually
sooth sayers are given equal official footing; since
if malign properties lie equal; fanciful rhetoric
infects, even negates dry studious hardship…in
principia.

[Israel Moga]

I really Loved the picture, and ill like to buy it in high definition. Im from México.
thks

[Israel Moga]

THe picture that im in love is: Books by colour, blurred

[Rod]

Israel, I give you permission to simply take the large sized version of that image at http://www.flickr.com/photos/rodcorp/60832830/sizes/o/ - it's not high resolution but it's the largest I've got.