Sorted Books

By Nina Katchadourian and Brian Dillon

Delighting in the look and feel of books, conceptual artist Nina Katchadourian's playful photographic series proves that books' covers—or more specifically, their spines—can speak volumes. Over the past two decades, Katchadourian has perused libraries across the globe, selecting, stacking, and photographing groupings of two, three, four, or five books so that their titles can be read as sentences, creating whimsical narratives from the text found there. Thought-provoking, clever, and at times laugh-out-loud funny (one cluster of titles from the Akron Museum of Art's research library consists of: Primitive Art/Just Imagine/Picasso/Raised by Wolves), Sorted Books is an enthralling collection of visual poems full of wry wit and bookish smarts.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Chronicle Books Digital
• Release date: Feb 8, 2013
• ISBN: 9781452126869

Reviews for Sorted Books

[sullywriter_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The art of book sorting.

[lisa2013_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is so brilliant! Why didn’t I think of this?! Now I do want to steal the idea. If I can find the “right” books, I can see taking photos and making greeting cards using this technique. It would also be fun to leave books around for others to find so I can see if they see the message presented; I’m often so unobservant that unless I was looking for it I might not notice.I normally love books for their contents, not their covers, and only occasionally for the titles, but I love art too, and this is inspired art.Sorted books refers to books placed so that they say or mean something. I need to give a few samples of the included book clusters in order to adequately describe them:A few examples:Animal Dreams – Secret Gardens – Where the Sidewalk Ends – No Boundary – Where the Wild Things AreandDyslexia – October 57 – October 75andIndian History for Young Folks – Our Village – Your National Parksand the last one in the book:Hope and Have – The Life That CountsThere are so many wonderful ones, some funny, some profound, almost all very smart, and I’d love to reveal a bunch of them, but it’ll be more fun for people to read the book and discover them for themselves. (I didn’t “get” several, including the few foreign language ones that were included.)So now I’m looking at my shelved books and trying to figure out how to play with them, and yes, I’d love to make some greeting cards to send to friends. I borrowed this from the library. If there were even more book clusters shown it’s the kind of book I’d love to own. It’s a perfect coffee table type book, because you can open it anywhere and appreciate what’s on the page.Thanks again to Melody for alerting me to this book. Reading it these last few days has been a perfect experience for me, one worth savoring.Highly recommend for artists and book lovers and readers and writers.

[dono421846 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Simple, powerful premise: "I spent days shifting and arranging books, composing them so that their titles formed short sentences. The exercise was intimate, like a form of portraiture, and it felt important that the books I selected should function as a cross section of the larger collection." The hidden theme within a library accrued piecemeal.