It’s our little relief against the gray, wintry Cincinnati doldrums, and, a bit of “organized rebellion” against the order of things.  This winter quarter, the Archives & Rare Books Library has decided to shake things up with a different shelving system for its reference collection – by color!  From February 15 through March 15, the books in our reference area are reorganized into blues, reds, greens, yellows, browns, whites, and blacks.

The idea was spurred by a similar exhibit in San Francisco in 2004.  Artist Chris Cobb created “There is Nothing Wrong in This Whole Wide World” in the city’s Adobe Bookshop, working through the night with a team of volunteers to arrange the used bookstore’s inventory of 20,000 books according to the color spectrum.  Our effort is much more modest: several hundred books, but, with the academic imperative of still being able to find necessary books for students and faculty.  We’re relying on experience, of course, along with a familiarity with the collection that has a book’s particular color and size burned into our memory banks!

In institutional libraries, it is absolutely necessary to have an accepted method of uniformity in shelving books.  In our case, it’s the Library of Congress call number system.  But don’t you just want to buck the system sometimes?  Every so often, shouldn’t we poke it with a stick?   After all, in our homes and offices, we arrange our books according to our own idiosyncratic designs and whims – size, shape, color, topic, author, and on and on.

So, gentle viewer, if you would like to send us a little message with how you organize your personal library, along with a photo perhaps, we would be very happy to post it on our site.  Send it to: archives@ucmail.uc.edu.  How we shelve is how we read, so reject that tedious weather outside your windows!