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 130 book clusters.
Please click on the images below to see the full series from each sorting.
Reference took place in a now-defunct New York gallery called Spot in 1996. The gallery director, who also lived in the back of the space, was a photographer and former eye surgeon. His book collection reflected his interest in art history, theory, photography and criticism, but there were also many medical reference books left over from his past profession. In effect, there were two kinds of books on seeing: the books dealing with vision in the context of art history and criticism, and the books dealing with vision in its most mechancial and literal sense.
Special Collections was a book sorting done in 1996 at the Athenaeum Arts and Music Library in La Jolla, CA. The library was housed in a beautiful Mission-style building in an upscale shopping district. Although open to the public, only members could borrow books. Many charming retirees frequented the library, some coming to browse the books and others working as volunteers. The atmosphere of the library was quiet, romantic, and contemplative, and the library's collection focused largely on famous artists and musicians immortalized as classics of the western cultural past. There was also an unusually large children's book section. When the book clusters were complete, they were displayed as an exhibition on shelves in the front reading room of the library.
The Akron Art Museum in Akron, OH commissioned a book sorting project in 2001, based on the holdings of the museum's own research library. Their book collection had extensive materials and catalogs from various contemporary art exhibtions, as well as many large-format, hardback monographs. There was a special section on the business and fundraising side of museum administration. The books from the library did not circulate to the general public, and the library itself was so separate from the main exhibition areas that most visitors had no idea there was a library there at all. When the sorting project was complete, thirteen book clusters were brought to the gift shop located behind the front desk and integrated into the displays.
Shark is a journal of art and poetics based in New York. The two editors, a poet and a painter, publish the journal from a home office lined wall-to-wall with books. Following an invitation from the editors, the book sorting took place in Spring 2001 as a project to be published in Shark. The most intriguing part of the library was the extensive collection of contemporary poetry, where many books had particular unusual titles. Grammatically, many of these titles were quite unorthodox, consisting of words like an isolated adverb or sentence fragment.
San Antonio collector and art patron Linda Pace lived in a home which also housed her extensive art collection. There were many books in both the public and private spaces. Many of those in the public areas were art catalogs and publications related to the artists and works in her collection, whereas the books in the more private quarters were very personal in nature, dealing with dreams, grieving, and myth, to name a few examples. Combining books from different parts of the house—mixing the public with the private—became the focus of the sorting. When complete, the books clusters were installed upstairs in an office/guest room that had a small library.
While on a residency at IASPIS in Stockholm in 2004, the Strindberg Museum generously gave me permission to work with August Strindberg's books. Strindberg lived in a 4th-floor apartment in BlΠtornet (the Blue Tower) at Drottninggatan 85, where he spent the last four years of his life until his death in 1912. A room on the 6th floor housed his research library with the majority of his books. The breadth of Strindberg's interests was immense. I was perhaps most surprised to find how little literature there was compared to the many volumes of linguistic, scientific, religious, historical, geography and reference texts. It usually helps me to physically manipulate the books when I am composing the clusters, but because many of Strindberg's books were extremely fragile, I needed to adopt new methods. Using a digital camera and writing down book titles on notecards, I spent three days documenting the library and making sure I carefully read every book title on every book there. Then I worked at home, shuffling around the hundreds of notecards to create the clusters and then cross-checking against the digital pictures to make sure the physical properties of the books in question would work in combination. There were many firsts involved in Sorting Strindberg: it was the first time I worked in languages other than English; the first time I worked with a canonical writer; the first time I worked with books that had an older design style; and the first time I worked with someone dead. There were new decisions: was the goal to write in Strindberg's voice, to somehow channel him through his books? Was I obligated to express his opinions, or was there space for my own? Did the clusters need to reflect topics from his era, or mine? To an outsider, there is no Swedish writer more famous than Strindberg, and I found myself not only in his home country but in his home. Did I need to show a special kind of respect for him because he is so famous, so famously Swedish, and so dead? If nothing else, I wanted these selections to do justice to Strindberg's omnivorous intellectual appetite, and I felt happiest when this diversity could be reflected within just a single photograph.
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