Love how this essay reframes what seems like chaos into a deliberate intellectual stratgy. The idea that random shelving creates those "Hey, remember me?" moments is basically engineered serendipity for the mind. Most productivity systems over-optimize for retrieval, but there's real cognitive value in being surprised by waht's already in our collection. The physical act of moving books almost functions liek a forced review session where ideas get reshuffled and new combinatinos emerge.
I have over 300 books and just gave away 300 books and I organize my books by discipline . So anthropology , china, Hong Kong , oral history , theory , methods, poetry, fiction, graphic novels , gender ( asian women ) and globalization is my division. I sometimes have 6 copies of one book.
Thank you for articulating so lovingly my bibliophile tendencies. While mine are not quite so randomly organized, you articulate so well the value of the randomness that is there and the importance of the thingness of the book itself and the loving care involved in moving, sorting, shelving them. When the EMP hits or the AI takes over or so overcurates our digital lives, we who hold the libraries of humanity will be a bastion of the human endeavor.
Love how this essay reframes what seems like chaos into a deliberate intellectual stratgy. The idea that random shelving creates those "Hey, remember me?" moments is basically engineered serendipity for the mind. Most productivity systems over-optimize for retrieval, but there's real cognitive value in being surprised by waht's already in our collection. The physical act of moving books almost functions liek a forced review session where ideas get reshuffled and new combinatinos emerge.
I have over 300 books and just gave away 300 books and I organize my books by discipline . So anthropology , china, Hong Kong , oral history , theory , methods, poetry, fiction, graphic novels , gender ( asian women ) and globalization is my division. I sometimes have 6 copies of one book.
Thank you for articulating so lovingly my bibliophile tendencies. While mine are not quite so randomly organized, you articulate so well the value of the randomness that is there and the importance of the thingness of the book itself and the loving care involved in moving, sorting, shelving them. When the EMP hits or the AI takes over or so overcurates our digital lives, we who hold the libraries of humanity will be a bastion of the human endeavor.