rainbow gum, brown bus, grey fog

[arcadeaddict]

the idiots of the militant hippie bookstore on 16th came up with the brilliant idea to rearrange their entire stock by jacket color. not by author, not by title, not by subject, not by anything other then primal color and randomness. color. the multiple blues, the sickly seventies greens, the various shades of reds, pinks, on to burgundies. the

Comments

[scythrop]

UC has remote storage bunkers where seldom-used books are sorted by spine height - maybe they were going for the offsite underground look and took a misstep or two? (Of course the storage bunker is run on barcodes and robots ... or so I like to imagine.)

How long are you in SF for? There's an ever-diminishing but still real possibility we'll be up there around the end of the month; it could be fun to meet up for coffee or something.

[arcadeaddict]

Oh shoot, I go back to being a New Yorker on Tuesday... but I'm sure our paths will cross one day and coffee sounds fun. Thanks for thinking of it.

Is this UCLA's storage bunker you're speaking of ? I have a theory that the special collections library was curated by a long lost Warhola or something.... unmarked boxes of half eaten birthday cake, penny flip books, and tea stained sweepstake envelopes. I do hear that arranging books by size makes them more resistant on impact for when the bombs hit!

[scythrop]

Ja, it's at UCLA but all of the southern UC campuses use it. (There is a northern version as well.) Right now I'm mad at them because I sent a manuscript collection there in February and as of last week it seems they've misplaced it. Maybe I should start using colored boxes instead of those dreary tan acid- and lignin-free bores!

UCLA special collections is hilarious. I used to work there (but not there - it was complicated) and it was always so fun to poke around & look at stuff like the ancient town history bound in human skin, or Anais Nin's diaries, chained up in a footlocker. And one of the catalogers there did absolutely THE BEST fake Necronomicon catalog record ever. It kept goth-geeks in a froth for years when the reference staff would have to explain that it was "missing."