How do you arrange your bookcases? April 15, 2005
Posted by Andy Roberts in : hi res photos , trackbackThe most obvious choice is probably
but why bother with that? For a system prioritised for ease of maintenance how about
.. just add new books to the end.
Sometimes it’s only practical to make the best use of available shelf space by organising books together based on
Now check out the photo below - it’s a bookcase which somebody rearranged according to
The very idea of this conjures up all sorts of questions. Can you judge a book by it’s cover afterall? As the years go by, names and titles are easy to forget but perhaps visual memory is more persistent and much faster to zoom in on. The alphabet is quite an unnatural construction with no real logical sequence between any of the letters, in fact come to think of it - the alphabet is completely and pointlessy arbitrary! What use is the alphabetical sequence to any one and why on earth does it feature so highly in early literacy teaching? You would think that at the very least they could have grouped the vowels together, but no. .
Clearly a new, logical alphabetical sequence needs to be invented and I propose that it should be based either on the phonetic function of the letters, or on their written appearance (lower case version)
By the way, I found the photo deep in the archives of an old hard disk and I’ve no idea where it came from originally, so if it’s yours , - please claim copywright by commenting below.
is an online professional who initiated DARnet 
Not sure where the photo comes from (although I’m sure I’ve seen it before. This might be where the idea came from though: http://www.pushby.com/tomas/2004/11/15/
As for re-arranging the alphabet phonetically, you have the problem that the letters of the english alphabet don’t correspond perfectly to phonemes and that phonemes are organised by place and manner of articulation (so you have a 2D chart), not to mention the havoc that changing the order would cause
But, here’s my best attempt:
pbtdjkxqcgmnfvszhwrylaeiou
I look for books based on their size and colour - and in our house usually their last location! I have over 40 books by the bedside.
As for phonetics - what does this say?
“ghoti”
Wow Frank, a whole bookshop arranged by colour - spectacular. I wonder if the volunteers did actually turn up to put them all back again the next day though!
Eve - I think ghoti is pronounced “fish” but I can’t explain it all. No cigar for me, thanks. I don’t.