cartographies, taxonomies

Hello! I appear to be taking my time off quite seriously.

One of the useful things I’ve been doing is organising my books. After my stroke, when I could no longer carry on as an academic, I had to get rid of the majority of the books that I owned. This was one of the most difficult things I had to do in those very difficult months: we were living in a small flat in Edinburgh at the time, and there was no room and no alternative. But then, I moved on with my recovery and my life: things got better and I began to read and think and work again. I read an awful lot, and, me being me, I of course then began to acquire more books: instead of books about 18th century history, I bought books about knitting and textiles, books about art, design and colour, books about the brain, resourceful disabled bodies, and creative practice; books about the different parts of Scotland in which I was enjoying spending time. I read an awful lot more: with each new project, the books expanded into every single room of our Carbeth house. We made more shelf space, acquired more shelves, but as time and me and my ABE books habit went on, the books ended up as double – and in some cases triple and quadruple – stacked in different places around the house. My desk was positioned in the middle of several teetering piles, and there was no form of organisation to speak of. Any “system”, such as it was, relied on the moment of first encounter, and finding an individual book became an activity akin to archeology. That is: to locate a book, I’d have to remember exactly what I was working on and thinking about during the days and weeks of its first reading, and then dig back – way back – through the shelves and strata of deep time.

Here in the mill, we and my books finally have a bit more space. I’ve been able to dedicate one room as my library, or labyrinth, and thanks to a strategic intervention by my friend Rob and the IKEA kallax shelving system, have now devised a very nifty layout. There are corridors and recesses, in which my books can face each other, and the depth of the shelves maximises double stacking, access, and visibility. Win win!

There are two windows in the labyrinth, and each book corridor is also illuminated by a lamp . . .

. . . allowing light to filter through between each shelf (so that I can – you know – actually see the books I need to find) . . .

. . .and for particularly big or tall tomes (hello books about knitting, art, and colour), there are dedicated single-stacked spaces in shelving units positioned against the walls.

I love this space so much. For the first time in almost fifteen years, I actually know where everything is and – what’s more – I can actually find it.

And so, I have spent several happy days arranging my books. There are 200 individual kallax recesses in the library: I’ve numbered each, and produced a sort of map.

Each numbered square represents a kallax recess, and each different colour or pattern on the squares represents a different book genre or category. These categories are fairly broad – “Knitting” “Scotland”, “Poetry” “Writing in translation” – and, of course, the choice of which category a particular book belongs in is fairly idiosyncratic, since only I am making that decision. In fact, this whole process has made me think a lot about the arbitrariness of taxonomies, cartographies, and systems of classification and organisation. I’m generally not much of a fan of the latter, but I confess I am rather fond of the colourful map of my library which, now it’s completed, quite unintentionally reminds me a little of the work of Nigel Peake.

This process has also made me think about my obsession with arranging pebbles . . .

. . . but most of all, I have been thinking about Borges’s hilarious On the Analytical language of John Wilkins

yours, happy in my arbitrary emporium of knowledge.

Kate x