Saturday, September 27, 2008

Sorted Books

Jordan sent me this link to Nina Katchadourian's Sorted Books project (which he found via Boing-Boing). As the artist explains :

The Sorted Books project began in 1993 years ago and is ongoing. The project has taken place in many different places over the years, ranging form private homes to specialized public book collections. The process is the same in every case: culling through a collection of books, pulling particular titles, and eventually grouping the books into clusters so that the titles can be read in sequence, from top to bottom. The final results are shown either as photographs of the book clusters or as the actual stacks themselves, shown on the shelves of the library they were drawn from. Taken as a whole, the clusters from each sorting aim to examine that particular library's focus, idiosyncrasies, and inconsistencies — a cross-section of that library's holdings. At present, the Sorted Books project comprises more than 30 book clusters.
There's some wonderful poetry to be read from the collected book spines. The one below is entitled Women.

You might also like to check out LibraryThing which has an intriguing collection of bookpiles, contributed by readers around themes.

These pictures make me want to go and pull titles off my own shelves to make a statement with. And if you feel simularly inspired you can email me your pic (sharonbakar at yahoo dot com) and I will put it up.

1 comment:

dreameridiot said...

Wow, that's really cool. Thanks for sharing this, Sharon.