Petroski - The book on the bookshelf

To Engineer Is Human:
The Role of Failure in Successful Design

Beyond Engineering:
Essays and Other Attempts to Figure without Equations

The Pencil:
A History of Design and Circumstance

The Evolution of Useful Things

Design Paradigms:
Case Histories of Error and Judgment in Engineering

Engineers of Dreams:
Great Bridge Builders and The Spanning of America

Invention by Design:
How Engineers Get from Thought to Thing

Remaking the World:
Adventures in Engineering

The Book on the Bookshelf

Paperboy:
Confessions of a Future engineer

Small Things Considered:
Why There Is No Perfect Design

Pushing the Limits:
New Adventures in Engineering

Success Through Failure:
The Paradox of Design

The Toothpick:
Technology and Culture

The Essential Engineer:
Why Science Alone Will Not Solve Our Global Problems

How can we arrange the books on our bookshelves? This question, like every question about order and design, is one to which there are many more answers than there are letters in the alphabet. Let us begin to count the waystotally, half-so-, and not-so-seriouslyin no particularly significant order, and without any claim of completeness or exhaustiveness:

1. BY AUTHORS LAST NAME . This alphabetical ordering is the plainvanilla way of arranging books on bookshelves, but there are several problems one can encounter in doing so. For one, other than familiar standards like Bartletts Familiar Quotations and Rogets Thesaurus, we tend not to remember the author of reference books, and might be hard pressed to locate our dictionary if it were not a Websters or a Funk & Wagnalls.

Alphabetizing does have the advantage of grouping a particular authors works all in one place, but it has the obvious disadvantage of randomly distributing works on the same subject while juxtaposing those that make strange bedfellows. Susan Sontag is reported to have allowed that it would set her teeth on edge to put Pynchon next to Plato. Thus the strict alphabetization by author of books, which at first would seem to be so logical and easy, soon reveals itself to be as fraught with frustrations and cautions as was the old library card catalog and is the modern online catalog.

In following a strict alphabetical order, one also has to make decisions as to whether to shelve O. Henrys books under O or Hor under P for the short-story writers real name, William Sydney Porterand then has to remember what was decided, and may even have to remember what O. Henrys real name was. One could, of course, incorporate directions into ones bookshelf, as an O. Henry, See Porter, William Sydney card used to do in many a card catalog. What form such a redirection should take on a bookshelf is itself problematic, for a card would likely be lost among the books. I have seen libraries put finding directions on book-sized blocks of wood that were shelved just like regular books, but too liberal a use of such a system would take up valuable space in a bookcase.

2. BY TITLE . We would not expect book titles to present the same problems to the alphabetizer as do the names of authors who use pen names, but difficulties can be encountered. When Donald Normans The Psychology of Everyday Things was issued in paperback, its title was changed to The Design of Everyday Things. Thus, in a library that contained both titles, the same book would be shelved under both D and P. In a library that had only one, we might have to realize that the book existed under a different title than the one by which we know it.

Furthermore, many book titles are enigmatic (as Tracy Kidders The Soul of a New Machine, about the creation of a computer) or allusive and thus elusive (as William H. Chafes Never Stop Running, about the American liberal Allard Lowenstein), and we may or may not remember them when we are looking for the book among our titularly alphabetized volumes.

3. BY SUBJECT . This is an order that I tend to use, but subject can be a very elusive category. On one shelf I have a group of books dealing with design; on several other shelves I have books about bridges. Where do I put a book on the design of bridges? I have avoided having to make such Solomon-like decisions by choosing to have the bridge shelves directly beneath the design shelves. (Should I have located the bridges above?) The design of computers and computer software is another category of books that seems to be multiplying on my shelves. For some reason, I began to group these books together on the other end of the case, and so they are nowhere near the books on design generally, which they have much more to do with than the books about dams and dam disasters that they are now butted up against.

Booksellers like Barnes & Noble, whose names have been in alphabetical order since the business was founded in 1873, tend to use an order within an order. Books are grouped in broad subject categories and then generally alphabetized by author within that. For authors with multiple works within the same category, we can alphabetize those according to title, but then we will have really begun to complicate the ordering, for we will have alphabetized by title within an alphabetization by author within a subject category, which may or may not be in alphabetical order with respect to other subject categories in our collection. Though we may have become accustomed to such a pseudo-alphabetical arrangement, it is far from ideal and can be inconvenient when we are looking for new books by a favorite author who writes on several different subjectsor under different pseudonyms, though sometimes the genres are as different as the names and may as well be by entirely different authors.

4. BY SIZE . This is a popular way to arrange books, and I use it to a certain extent, but books about bridges, of which I have the several shelves mentioned above, come in a variety of sizes. There are the standard-sized books, generally referred to by librarians as octavos, such as David McCulloughs The Great Bridge, his masterful story of the building of the Brooklyn Bridge. But like that structures tall towers and long span, many books on bridges are either taller or wider than the standard size.

The larger formats of a lot of bridge books, loosely described as quartos, also fall into two categories, perhaps best described by the computer-printing terms, portrait mode and landscape mode. The terms are more or less self-explanatory, and the former allows for better showing the tall towers of bridges and the latter for showing their length. My main bridge bookshelf begins on the left end with a group of landscape-format books, which state departments of transportation seem to prefer for documenting their historic bridges. The smallest of these books is about 11 inches wide and so comes almost to the edge of my bookcases 11-inch-deep shelves (their irregular size is attributable to the fact that they have a piece of molding finishing their plywood core). Some other landscape bridge books are 12 inches wide and so overhang the bookshelf, which I find mildly annoying. The widest bridge book in my library, Bridges by Judith Dupr (which titularly joins Bridges by David J. Brown, Bridges by Fritz Leonhardt, Bridges by Steven A. Ostrow, and Bridges by Graeme and David Outerbridge, all classified as quartos in portrait mode), has a nonstandard format that measures 18 inches horizontally to its 7 inches vertically, thus making it by far the widest (longest?) book I have in any category. If I were to shelve it in a conventional manner, this book would project almost 7 inches out from my bookshelf and would require a yellow flag to warn passersby. (Thus far I have kept the Dupr