In a sidebar to an article on the problems the pure physicality of books causes people with lots of them (er, books, not problems), Marie Arana and Jonathan Yardley write about their family argument over how to sort books. She is the editor of Bookworld. He is the Washington Post’s book critic. She sorts them in an arbitrary pattern “that makes perfect sense to her but to anyone else is an unfathomably mystery.” He keeps nonfiction upstairs and fiction downstairs; he sub-sorts by category and arranges biographies alphabetically by subject.

If you have an interesting, ingenious or particularly dumb way of sorting books, I’d like to hear about it. (I’ll assume you’re ok with my using it as an example in my book or somewhere else.) [Tags: taxonomy EverythingIsMiscellaneous everything_is_miscellaneous marie_arana jonathan_yardley books]

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