Friday, February 05, 2010

The sorting of books

Today I stayed home with Minimus, who is sick, and on a whim decided to sort our books according to colour. Which is the only way to sort them if you're at all aestethic, I understand. I'm sort of a dormant aesthete myself. I want pretty, and it makes me feel bad when things aren't pretty, but I can't be bothered to make them pretty and I don't seem to have a great talent for it. If you see what I mean.

But anyway, I like this colour-sorting lark. It does make the whole clutter of books look more harmonious. Several problems did arise though - for example,  I agonized over whether to break the colour-coding rule and keep a series of books together anyway, but in the end I stuck to the rules pretty well. I decided on whites to beiges to yellows to oranges to reds to purples to blues to greens to browns to blacks to greys. Almost consistently.

Most books, I've discovered, have white spines. Quite a number have black. Red are not rare, but brown is. There are a surprising amount of yellows or peachy tones, and blues are often very mottled, not so many pure blues.. Purples may be the rarest. I'd have thought there'd be more greens... Make of this what you want.

4 comments:

Elisabeth said...

Quote from our sales rep:
"Does it have to be green? Green books don't sell."

bani said...

Imagine that. I would never have thunk it, actually. Most harmonious colour and all that.

li'l sis said...

Huh, and here I am, often drawn to pretty green covers, specially if they're emerald or forest green... But they have to be pretty and often covers look like they've been put together by someone's five year-old in paint.

bani said...

*snort*