Where the Books Match the Drapes
SFist was looking for a book the other day. But we, like, totally couldn't remember what it was called or who the author was. It was really popular, we might have seen it on Oprah or something, and it was about a guy with a thing in the place... yeah, you know. But, I mean, we totally remember the cover. It was blue. Yep, definitely blue. Do you know what book we're talking about?
We suppose that before we annoy the living daylights out of every single bookstore clerk and librarian in the area, we should try Adobe books. Artist Chris Cobb has reorganized the books by cover color. The rainbow browsing scheme might make it hard to find something to read based on your interests but you can be sure that whatever you bring home will match your sofa. You've only got a week until they re-order their books back to a scheme more conducive to locating something by topic. But for now it sure is really gosh-darned pretty.
Friend of SFist, Bill of Mermaniac, was there and took some great pictures of it. An interview with Chris Cobb on McSweeney's explains how he mapped it out and can easily put the books back. Which is good, because SFist had a bit of a twitch wondering about that. Not that we're obsessive-compulsive or anything.
A more permanent topical organizational system can be found at the Prelinger Library, which opened in October. The Prelinger Library is an appropriation-friendly, browsable collection of approximately 40,000 books, periodicals, printed ephemera and government documents.
The reliance on computer catalogs to find books by keyword in a library system coupled with increasingly closed-stack libraries, means the joy of "serendipitous browsing" seems to be in danger. Finding something by, basically, walking into the general area you think something might be and then looking around at what's on the shelf is one of the great ways of using libraries to broaden your interests. Think of it as "surfing" the library. In that context, the blue cover you spy on the next shelf over might lead you to a whole new way of looking at a topic or a whole new research obsession. You don't get that kind of experience looking at the search results on a screen. Stop us before we start talking about faceted classification and how, like, we're totally hot for Ranganathan and the Colon Classification Scheme
In the end though, we are fond of good old Dewey Decimal. We already know that our favorite topics are 070, 720 and 910 so that's pretty much right where we head in any library to start our leisurely afternoons of serendipitous browsing. How about you? What are your favorite Dewey numbers? Oh, come on, we know you have them.