A Spectrum is Haunting San Francisco

[beamjockey]

A good tip from shimgray led me to this, with pictures here.

Someone rearranged all the books in a San Francisco bookstore sorted by color:



It only took the art world 25 years to arrive where Todd Johnson and I once stood.



From: Bill Higgins-- Beam Jockey <higgins@fnal.gov>
Subject: Sort by color (was Re: Evocative Writing NOW Dewey)
Date: 2000/03/19
Message-ID: <pine.sgi.4.05.10003190135460.4692-100000@fsgi02.fnal.gov>#1/1
References: <89p6c1$fqc@nntpa.cb.lucent.com> <38C83D75.1EEB54A9@home.com> <952682363snz@bluejo.demon.co.uk> <uvrrcssu1arqbc5m878krp82ehe4vo6bif@4ax.com> <8alkh6$h4l$1@cedar.ggn.net> <38ce7455.214817937@news.demon.co.uk> <v30ucs8i3la72442di02ng901tvgth3v5f@4ax.com>
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII
Organization: Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory
Mime-Version: 1.0
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.fandom


On Tue, 14 Mar 2000, Vicki Rosenzweig wrote:
> There's "sort by color," which a friend of mine found she
> had at one point.
>
> I say "found she had" because she made the tactical mistake, during
> a move, of telling the people who were helping her unpack to just
> shelve the books in any way they felt like. Perhaps feeling a bit
> punchy, or perhaps figuring that sorting books by color is less work
> than a lot of other things they could have been doing, her friends
> arranged her books by color. She did not find this useful.

One summer about 20 years ago, when Todd Johnson was rooming with me, he
finished reading a novel and wanted to put it away. "Where should I put
this?" he asked.

"Back on the SF Paperbacks shelf," I said, "over there."

"Is there any system to this?" said he, finding that they were obviously not
in alphabetical order by author.

This triggered a discussion of various ways one could arrange one's
paperbacks. Earliest to latest? Thickest to thinnest? Before long, we were
gleefully shuffling books by color, winding up with one long rainbow shelf,
one long shelf of white spines, a smaller group of black ones, and a
handful of brown, gray, and tan ones.

I vetoed Todd's suggestion to insert black books at the locations of major
absorption lines in the solar spectrum.

I have retained this arrangement ever since. Not only is the rainbow
aesthetically pleasing, it's also a tourist attraction. People tell their
friends far and wide about Higgins's Chromatic Bookcase. First-time
visitors to The Nuclear Arms sometimes ask to see it. I have more books
now, but have carefully integrated them into the collection.

(A common misconception is that *all* our books are shelved by color. Nope.
Just the SF and fantasy paperbacks.)

I can usually recall the appoximate spine color of a book well enough to
find it. I'm sorry Vicki's friend didn't enjoy her chromatic collection.
But I'm very fond of mine.

I can't recall who suggested to me the ultimate shelving order: best to
worst.

--
Psst: I've got an idea for a movie: | Bill Higgins
a colony of computer-generated ants | Fermi National
saves the world from a falling asteroid. | Accelerator Laboratory
Don't tell the competing producers! | higgins@OBSOLETE_ADDRESS

Comments

[erik]

That's awesome! Have you contacted them to let them know they're not the innovators they probably assume?

[shsilver.livejournal.com]

The interior decorator my in-laws used tells a story of a woman who wanted to have her bookshelves look like something out of Home & Garden, so she arranged them by color and size. The woman lived with it for a couple of months before resorting them.

Alastair Cooke had his American history books organized geographically (books about the history of florida in the lower right, Maine in the upper right, etc.)

[wcg.livejournal.com]

And then there are the fantasy novels filed over in the Far Ultraviolet part of the spectrum:

Renunciates of Gor

Lazarus Long's Path of Nonviolence

Reefer Madness, by Spider Robinson

Collected Short Stories of Robert Jordan

[tigertoy.livejournal.com]

I vetoed Todd's suggestion to insert black books at the locations of major
absorption lines in the solar spectrum.

Party pooper! That would have taken it to a whole 'nother level.

The new geek party game: Choose a bizarre critereon for sorting your books (such as number of pages divided by cover price), sort them that way, and challenge visitors to figure out what it is.

[eub.livejournal.com]

I vetoed Todd's suggestion to insert black books at the locations of major absorption lines in the solar spectrum.

Oh, how could you?

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

I imagine Vicki's friend was elisem as I have heard her mention such a thing. I don't remember the details of the story, however.

What I find amusing here is that PEZ collectors have the same sorts of conversations about how to arrange their collections. Some put all the Disney PEZ together, etc. Some group them by species. Or Height, or... well, you get the idea.

In the world of PEZ this sort of obsessing over the smallest of details is known as "the minutiae of the stem." Some people fling themselves into that pit, others peer cautiously over the edge, yet others back slowly away.

"'Anything for fun,' I always say."

K.

[(Anonymous)]

Engineer Henry Petroski mentions this organizational scheme in The Book on the Bookshelf. (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0375406492/qid=1121447237)

"I vetoed Todd's suggestion to insert black books at the locations of major absorption lines in the solar spectrum."

Better than black books would be books that absorb too much time. The strongest absorbtion line would obviously be occupied by Dhalgren.

--pst314 nospam at hotmail

[charlie-meadows.livejournal.com]

On reading this, I became interested in the problem of retrieval. I can believe that one would find oneself remembering the color of book spines. It's just as well the "absorption line" scheme wasn't also adopted: could one *really* recall which "wavelength" a particular book corresponded to? (Much less which ionized species -- "Oh yes, that's one of my N-IV titles..." Should one then measure thicknesses in order to sort the black books into the spectrum according to approximate "line width"?)

I'd always wondered how the heck the monks ever found anything in the Library of Babel...