Sorted books project

The Sorted Books project began in 1993 and is ongoing. Iterations of the project have taken place in many different sites, ranging from 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. 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. The project can also function as a kind of portraiture. At present, the Sorted Books project comprises more than 130 book clusters from eight different sortings. The sorting here came from the home office of Shark, a journal of art and poetics based in New York.

-Nina Katchadourian