Sorted Books

Nina Katchadourian

• Publisher: Chronicle Books LLC
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781452113296
• eBook ISBN: 9781452126869
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

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

ONCE UPON A TIME IN DELAWARE/IN QUEST OF THE PERFECT BOOK 2012

In 2010, the Delaware Art Museum invited me to work with the books in the Helen Farr Sloan Library’s M. G. Sawyer Collection of Decorative Bindings. The collection comprises over two thousand books, acquired on the basis of their cover design. It was an opportunity to take a close look at the culture and history of the United States betweeen approximately 1870 and 1920. Fiction was dominated by themes of travel, romance, science, the automobile, rural American farm life, and the West. The Old World also hovers around the popular imagination in the many books about knights, kings, and European history. A visual and linguistic shift takes place between prim Victorian bindings and the racy dust jackets of books thirty years later. Spectacularly gilded covers reflect the wealth of the United States during certain periods, and austere designs take over during times of belt-tightening. I noticed a curious surge in late nineteenth-century fiction romanticizing Native Americans and despaired when I realized how this coincided with their violent displacement and decimation.

I came to know the books in this collection intimately through several visits to the museum but also by working remotely with the online database of the book covers. I printed out about seven hundred small-scale copies and spent months arranging them in my studio before coming to the museum to finalize the groupings. This sorting yielded more book clusters than any other I had done to date, but it was an agonizing last day, and it felt impossible to stop when there was al...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Open Stacks
• Twenty Years of Sorting Books
• Composition 1993
• Reference 1996
• Special Collections Revisited 1996/2008
• Akron Stacks 2001
• Sorting Shark 2001
• Bookpace 2002
• Sorting Strindberg 2004
• Once Upon a Time in Delaware/in Quest of the Perfect Book 2012
• Acknowledgments
• Copyright