Judge a Book by Its Cover

A few years ago, one of my good friends was helping me and my wife move into our new apartment and she offered to organize our bookshelf. Being unorganized people who own a lot of books, we were glad to let her do it. Once she was finished, I walked over to the bookshelf curious to see the system of organization she had employed: genre, author, date, etc. After I stared at our books for a few minutes and failed to notice a consistent theme, I turned to our friend and asked her how she had organized them. She said, “aesthetically.” I turned back to the bookshelf and immediately understood. The books were sorted according to color, height, width, and every other detail about a book besides its actual content. On the Road sat next to a copy of The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe and it looked perfectly appropriate.

Franco Moretti’s book Graphs, Maps, Trees (along with the Hayles readings from two weeks ago) got me thinking about this incident again and the ways that this new system of classification may tell me something new about my library. Although my bookshelf has since reverted to its normal state of disorganization, I still recall certain sections of color and height and that may be enough for the purposes of this blog. Discussing the benefits of a more “bird’s eye view” approach to literary history, Moretti writes in his section Graphs that “this process can only be glimpsed at the level of the cycle: individual episodes tend, if anything, to conceal it, and only the abstract pattern reveals the true nature of the historical process” (29). I think the aesthetic realignment of my bookshelf forced me to reconsider my collection not in light of “individual episodes”, such as phases in my literary tastes, but rather as an “abstract pattern” that in its arbitrariness foregrounded the materiality of my library. I had never considered questions such as: “Why do I own so many white and black books?” and “Do publishers make more white and black books than other colors?”.  These were interesting questions, but perhaps the most revealing moment came when I realized that somehow all of my favorite books were in a section on the top shelf at the smaller end of the size spectrum and most of them had neutral colors. Although it may seem like an obvious connection, I had never considered how my taste in a book might possibly be influenced by something as seemingly superficial as its length or its appearance. This got me thinking in a chicken and egg sort of way: Is it the book’s shape and color that makes me enjoy it more or is it just a coincidence that the type of books I like happen to be made in this style? The more I think about these questions the less I see a difference in them. It is in this way that I see a connection to Hayles’ ideas about the materiality of the text and how a book’s form can affects its content, an action that takes place both ways with the content of the book influencing its eventual form and the form of previous books influencing the content of future books. Thus, the next time somebody asks me if they think I might like a new book, it might be more apt to ask them what it looks like rather than who wrote it.