Prentiss Riddle: Books

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There is Nothing Wrong in This Whole Wide World

Every book and art blogger, moblogger and phlogger within 100 miles of it has covered this already, but artist Chris Cobb has rearranged all 20,000 books in a San Francisco bookstore by color.

Chris Cobb's book installation, by J. Mayer

Delightful. An explanation and more photos are here, and there are still more in Flickr here.

I used to see a similar effect in bookstores in Europe, where the books were often arranged by publisher rather than by author, and some of the publishing houses would color-code their bindings with a cumulative effect in mind.

For some reason it also makes me think of ten or twelve years ago when Fran Miksa at UT's library school suggested that online catalogs should provide images of the covers of the books. It was a bit heretical at the time, but then along came Amazon, which is now the de facto online catalog for a lot of researchers before they hit the libraries. One shouldn't judge a book by its cover but a cover often does contain a lot of useful metadata.

Meanwhile, it was only last year that I started arranging the shirts in my closet by color. What a difference!

books 2005.01.14 link