Bookstores don't use Dewey. Don't worry: we're over it. And anyway, if they did, there wouldn't be so many opportunities for guerrilla classification.* First there was that guy in San Francisco who went with his friends to Adobe Bookshop one night, and reclassified its entire stock by color. Not truly guerrillarrific, though, since the store knew what was going on, and they changed everything back after a few weeks anyway. But now things are getting serious, courtesy of the Ministry of Reshelving. The plan: to relocate, in bookstores worldwide, one thousand nine hundred and eighty four copies of George Orwell's 1984, from their currently "incorrect" location in the "Fiction" or "Literature" sections, to a "more suitable" location such as "History" or "True Crime." If you accept the Ministry's mission to "discreetly move" the books, you can download a "This book has been relocated by the Ministry of Reshelving" bookmark for insertion in any reclassified copy, and upload photographic evidence to Flickr. As the Ministry humbly points out, "this project is not a critique of bookstore culture, the state of the shelving industry, or even of pervasive government surveillance. It is merely an observation that 2 + 2 = 5, and 5 is no longer fiction." Righto. Meanwhile, performance art goes in 700; avant gaming in 790 (we think). And thanks to Alane and Laura for the simultaneous tip-offs.
* I'm quite pleased with that phrase, by the way: if you search for it on Google (with one or two "r"s), you don't get any results. So, once this page is indexed by Google, "guerrilla classification" will be a Googlewhack. Unless somebody else uses it before then, in which case ... Oh, never mind.
I really do wish bookstores would use the dewey system. It's horribly difficult to find things now, as it is.
Posted by: matt b. | 25 August 2005 at 05:27 PM
I'll go the opposite way, and wish that nobody used the dewey system. It makes less and less sense as time goes by... but then again, us foolish humans are well known for sticking to ineffective solutions simply because we're either 1) determined to prove them correct or 2) too lazy to do something different.
Posted by: Rachel | 02 July 2006 at 02:53 PM
Actually, this is an interesting point.
The University of Illinois still uses Dewey Decimal. By the time it became not the favored system of large libraries, there were so many millions of volumes that they decided not to change.
It may have something to do with I think one of the founders was a student of Dewey's.
Posted by: Craig Steffen | 02 July 2006 at 03:30 PM
When I was in grade school, I was asked, "Who was AdmiraL Dewey?"
"He invented the Dewey Decimal System."
My librarian mother thought it was funny.
Posted by: Kitty | 02 July 2006 at 05:23 PM
It looks like you've been indexed now so that's a google-whack!
Posted by: Caitlin | 03 July 2006 at 03:37 AM