Better Homes & Gardens: A New Threat to Libraries Everywhere

Someone just Googled "books sorted by color" and found this post of mine, about the Adobe Bookshop artwork/event last week in which all of the shop's books were sorted by color.  But they also found this:

Better Homes & Gardens: Family Libraries - how to manage a home ...... Tuck the paperbacks into square baskets and stack some books on the shelves. Then, fill in with hardcover books, sorted by color. ...
www.findarticles.com/p/articles/ mi_m1041/is_2_79/ai_69964503 -  22k -   Cached - Similar pages

But BH&G cautions you not to get carried away in sorting your home library:

Too many dark books will create a black hole on your shelves, so break up the pattern with lighter ones.

... as the folks at Adobe Bookshop can certaintly attest -->

So is this what passes for library science in the heartland?

P.S. over on Boynton, a bookseller adds this festive holiday anecdote on the topic of cross-referencing by color.  Festive, at least, to the non-booksellers among us:

Speaking as a bookseller, we are perennially asked by absent-minded customers for books of which they can remember neither the title, nor the author, but only that "it was blue...". A colleague of mine, faced with one such enquiry, after a hard morning at the bookface, drew himself up to his full height, and replied, with dignity, "Madam, you are in luck, for I am in charge of all the blue books in the shop."

Happy Thanksgiving.  Oh, and you outside the US, try not to sell dollars too fast while we're gone, OK?

Comments

[Pica]

When I worked at the Harvard Press it was a once-a-year-or-so giggle that someone would order the entire Loeb Classical Library (tiny books of the Greek and Roman Classics, red for Greek, green for Latin, side-by-side translation), for an outrageous sum, simply so they could paper their wall with it and look smart and well read.

So I suppose it was only a matter of time before Better Homes & Gardens got hold of this...

[Miss Bliss]

Um...I don't even know what to say about this quite honestly. Obviously you shouldn't be using the words "science" and "heartland" in the same sentence though.

[Barak]

Hi Jarrett. Here's the link to my thoughts on the matter.

http://baraksblog.blogspot.com/2004/11/there-is-nothing-wrong-in-whole-wide.html

[Barak]

Damn, here's the link.