Sorted Books

By Nina Katchadourian and Brian Dillon

A witty and thought-provoking collection of visual poems constructed from stacks of books.

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.

Praise for Sorted Books 

“Katchadourian’s project . . . takes on a weight beyond its initial novelty. It’s a love letter to books, book collecting and the act of reading.” —San Francisco Chronicle 

“As a longtime fan of [Katchadourian’s] long-running Sorted Books project I’m thrilled for the release of Sorted Books—a collection spanning nearly two decades of her witty and wise minimalist mediations on life by way of ingeniously arranged book spines. . . . In an era drowned in periodic death tolls for the future of the physical book, her project stands as a celebration of the spirit embedded in the magnificent materiality of the printed page.” —Brain Pickings

“Katchadourian’s stacks possess an understated sophistication; they are true to the intimate nature of books and yet reveal their dramatic features and unexpected potential.” —Publishers Weekly

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Feb 8, 2013
• ISBN: 9781452126869

Book preview

SORTED BOOKS

NINA KATCHADOURIAN

Introduction by Brian Dillon

OPEN STACKS

BRIAN DILLON

I am unpacking my library. Yes I am. Thus the famously odd beginning to Walter Benjamin’s 1931 essay Unpacking My Library. Odd, that is, because, even allowing for peculiarities in the original German or the English translation (which I am unable to judge) and bearing in mind the intimate scene that Benjamin wishes to capture at the outset as he asks us to picture his books strewn about him, the line Yes I am has struck many readers as awkward and redundant. What exactly is its tone? Playful? Relieved? Triumphant? Pompous? (I always read it as if punctuated otherwise: Yes I am!) In light of Nina Katchadourian’s Sorted Books—a project that for twenty years has seen the artist arranging armfuls of books and their titles to poetic and deadpan comic effect—I have begun to think that he might have meant it a little defensively. I am unpacking my books, he seems to say; they are not unpacking, or shelving, themselves. As if that is the kind of thing we could expect libraries to do when we are not looking.

Perhaps this interpretation seems more fanciful than Benjamin’s little sentence allows. Consider, however, the word that Katchadourian uses to describe her gatherings of three, four, or five (sometimes, but rarely, fewer or more) volumes. She calls them clusters, and the word has a plausibly organic implication: it is as though the books have convened of their own accord like plants or insects—following secret or, in the case of the more explicitly comic or narrative groupings, not-so-secret attractions. But a cluster might equally be an astronomical phenomenon, like a constellation: a design composed or conjured out of vastly distant points in space, seen as such only from a single vantage. Or it might be a phonetic aggregation of consonant or vowel sounds, flung into intimacy by speech though they belong to different words. Webster’s Third New International Dictionary gives us the consonantly crunchy phrase winch sprocket by way of example: read it aloud and the cluster nchspr suddenly seems an unlikely thing to have said. A cluster, in other words, yokes together discrete elements in an order that is at once natural and estranging.

Isn’t this to some degree how we organize and use our

Reviews for Sorted Books

[sullywriter_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The art of book sorting.

[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.

[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.