When I wrote the other day about a couple of ideas for visual storytelling, I had a nagging feeling there was another one I had wanted to mention.

Nina Katchadourian has undertaken the Sorted Books project, as she describes below. She groups the books so that the titles on their spines make some sort of statement. Dare we say we could create a story with the spiny titles?

The Sorted Books project began in 1993 years ago and is ongoing. The project has taken place in many different places over the years, ranging form 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. The final results are shown either as photographs of the book clusters or as the actual stacks themselves, shown on the shelves of the library they were drawn from. 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. At present, the Sorted Books project comprises more than 130 book clusters.