i202 Fall 2010 School of Information, UC Berkeley

Since 1993, artist Nina Katchadourian has been sifting through library collections and remixing their holdings in a delightfully unconventional way. I was going through her ongoing Sorted Books project that constructs irreverent, humorous and witty sentences by arranging a stack of books so that their titles can be read from top to bottom or left to right.

Katchadourian has scoured private collections and public libraries alike, for a total of over 130 book clusters to date. Always entertaining, her stacked sentences span the entire spectrum of slapstick humor and subtle social commentary. But what makes the series so powerful is the way these pithy quips and laconic snippets of narrative allow the viewer to construct complete stories around them, capturing in just a few words entire situational plot lines in this brilliantly innovative storytelling experiment.

Explore the Sorted Books project for  more fun than you could ever have with Shakespeare.