Is Reading Relevant? Featuring
Brief Notes on the Art and Manner of Arranging One’s Books by
Derek Green
“Please consider that books are the only form of mass media that address risky, potentially offensive topics. Consuming a book depends on the reader’s consent. That effort - compared to the passive nature of watching movies or listening to music - gives books a privacy and permission no other medium has.� Chuck Palahniuk
Table of Contents
George Prec
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Chuck Palahniuk
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Fight Club
22
Survivor
24
Invisible Monsters 26 Choke
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Lullaby
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Diary
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Haunted
34
Rant
36
Snuff
38
Pygmy
40
Tell-all
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Damned
44
About
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Brief Notes on the Art and Manner of Arranging One’s Books* Georges Prec
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Every library answers a twofold need, which is often also a twofold obsession: that of conserving certain objects (books) and that of organizing them in certain ways. One of my friends had the idea one day of stopping his library at 361 books. The plan was as follows: having attained, by addition or subtraction, and starting from a given number n of books, the number K = 361, deemed as corresponding to a library, if not an ideal then at least a sufficient library, he would undertake to acquire on permanent basis a new X only after having eliminated (by giving away, throwing out, selling or any other appropriate means) an old book Z, so that the total number K of works should remain constant and equal to 361: K + X >361> K - Z. As it evolved this seductive scheme came up against predictable obstacles for which the unavoidable solutions were found. First, a volume was to be seen as counting as one (1) book even if it contained three (3) novels(or collections
of poems, essays, etc.); from which it was deduced that three (3) or four (4) or n (n) novels by the same author counted (implicitly) as one (1) volume by that author, as fragments not yet brought together but ineluctably bringable together in a Collected Works. Whence it was adjudged that this or that recently acquired novel by this or that English-language novelist of the second half of the nineteenth century could not logical count as a new work X but as a work Z belonging to a series under construction: the set T of all the novels written by the aforesaid novelist (and God knows there are some!). This didn’t alter the original scheme in any way at all: only instead of talking about 361 books, it was decided that the sufficient library was ideally to be made up of 361 authors, whether they had written a slender opuscule or enough to fill a truck. This modification proved effective over several years. But it soon became apparent that certain works - romances of chivalry, for example - had no author or else had several authors, and that certain
*First published in L’Humidité in 1978. 1. A library I call a sum of books constituted by a non-professional reader for his own pleasure and daily use. This excludes the collections of bibliophiles and fine bindings by the yard, but also the majority of specialized libraries (those in universities, for example) whose particular problems match those of public libraries.
authors - the Dadaists, for example - could not be kept separate from one another without automatically losing 80 to 90 per cent of what made them interesting. The idea was thus reached of a library restricted to 361 subjects - the term is vague but the groups it covers are vague also at times - and up until now that limitation has been strictly observed. So then, one of the chief problems encountered by the man who keeps the books he has read or promises himself that he will one day read is that of the increase in his library. Not everyone has the good fortune to be Captain Nemo: ‘...the world ended for me the day my Nautilus dived for the first time beneath the waves. On that day I bought my last volumes, my last pamphlets, my last newspapers, and since that time I would like to believe that mankind has neither thought nor written.’ Captain Nemo’s 12,000 volumes, uniformly bound, were thus classified once and for all, and all the more simply because the classification, as is made clear to us, was uncertain, at least from the language point of
view (a detail which does not at all concern the art of arranging a library but is meant simply to remind us that Captain Nemo spoke all languages indiscriminately). But for us, who continue to have to do with a human race that insists on thinking, writing and above all publishing, the increasing size of our libraries tends to become the one real problem. For it’s not too difficult, very obviously, to keep ten or twenty or let’s say even a hundred books; but once you start to have 361, or a thousand, or three thousand, and especially when the total starts to increase every day or thereabouts, the problem arises, first of all of arranging all these books somewhere and then of being able to lay your hand on them one day when, for whatever reason,you either want or need to read them at last or even to reread them. Thus the problem of a library is shown to be twofold: a problem of space first of all, then a problem of order.
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1. Of Space 1.1. Generalities Books are not dispersed but assembled. Just as we put all the pots of jam into a jam cupboard, so we put all our books into the same place, or into several same places. Even though we want to keep them, we might pile our books away into trunks, put them in the cellar or the attic, or in the bottoms of wardrobes, but we generally prefer them to be visible.
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In practice, books are most often arranged one beside the other, along a wall or division, on rectilinear supports, parallel with one another, neither too deep nor too far apart. Books are arranged - usually - standing on end and in such a way that the title printed on the sine of the work can be seen (sometimes, as in bookshop windows, the cover of the books is displayed, but it is unusual, proscribed and nearly always considered shocking to have only the edge of the book on show). In current room layouts, the library is known as an ‘area’ for. This, most often, is a module belonging as a whole to the ‘living-room’, which likewise contains a drop-leaf drinks cabinet drop-leaf writing desk two-door dresser hi-fi unit television console slide projector display cabinet etc. and is offered in catalogues adorned with a few false bindings. In practice books can be assembled just about anywhere.
1.2 Rooms where books may be put
in the entrance hall in the sitting room in the bedroom(s) in the bog Generally speaking, one kind of book is put in the room you cook in, the ones known as ‘cookery books’. It is extremely rare to find books in a bathroom, even though for many people this is a favorite place to read in. The surrounding humidity is unanimously considered a prime enemy of the conservation of printed texts. At the most, you may find in a bathroom a medicine cupboard and in the medicine cupboard a small work entitled What to do before the doctor gets there.
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1.3 Places in a room where books can be arranged
On the shelves of fireplaces or over radiators (it may be thought, even so, that heat may, in the long run, prove somewhat harmful), between two windows, in the embrasure of an unused door, on the steps of a library ladder, making this unusable (very chic), underneath a window, on a piece of furniture set at an angle and dividing the room into two (very chic, creates an even better effect with a few pot-plants).
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1.4 Things which aren’t books but are often met with in libraries
Matchbox-holders containing, or not, chemical matches (dangerous), a photograph of Ernest Renan in his study at the CollÊge de France, photographs in gilded brass frames, small engravings, pepper and mustard from Lufthansa, multicoloured pebbles and gravel, dried flowers in stemmed glasses, scale models of vintage cars, pen and ink drawings, packets of salt, picture hooks, pipe-cleaners, lead soldiers, letter-scales, *postcards, dolls’ eyes, ex-votos,, marbles, springs, tins.
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2. Of Order
A library that is not arranged becomes disarranged: this is the example I was given to try and get me to understand what entropy was and which I have several times verified experimentally. Disorder in a library is not serious in itself; it ranks with ‘Which drawer did I put my socks in?’. We always think we shall know instinctively where we have put such and such a book. And even if we don’t know, it will never be difficult to go rapidly along all the shelves.
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Opposed to this apologia for a sympathetic disorder is the small-minded temptation towards an individual bureaucracy: one thing for each place and each place for its one thing, and vice versa. Between these two tensions, one which sets a premium on letting things be, on a good-natured anarchy, the other that exalts the virtues of the tabula rasa, the cold efficiency of the great arranging, one always ends by trying to set one’s books in order. This is a trying, depressing operation, but one liable to produce pleasant surprises, such as coming upon a book you had forgotten because you could no longer see it and which, putting off until tomorrow what you won’t do today, you finally re-devour lying face down on you bed.
2.1 Ways of arranging books
ordered alphabetically ordered by continent or country ordered by colour ordered by date of acquisition ordered by date of publication ordered by format ordered by genre ordered by major periods of literary history ordered by language ordered by priority for future reading ordered by binding ordered by series
None of these classifications is satisfactory by itself. In practice, every library is ordered starting from a combination of these modes of classification, whose relative weighting, resistance to change, obsolescence and persistence give every library a unique personality.
*A famously pompous, highminded nineteenth-century scholar and writer, unlikely to have appealed to GP
We should first of all distinguish stable classifications from provisional ones. Stable classifications are those which, in principle, you continue to respect; provisional classifications are those supposed to last only a few days, the time it takes for a book to discover, or rediscover, its definitive place. This may be a book recently acquired and not yet read, or else a book recently read that you don’t quite know where to place and which you have promised yourself you will put away on the occasion of a forth-coming ‘great arranging’, or else a book whose reading has been interrupted and that you don’t want to classify before taking it up again and finishing it, or else a book you have used constantly over a given period, or else a book you have taken down to look up a piece of information or a reference and which you haven’t yet put back in its place, or else a book that you can’t put back in its rightful place because it doesn’t belong to you and you’ve several times promised to give it back, etc. In my own case, nearly three-quarters of my books have never really been classified. Those that are not arranged in a definitively provisional way are arranged in a provisionally definitive way, as at the OuLiPo. Meanwhile, I move them from one room to another, one shelf to another, one pile to another, and may spend three hours looking for a book without finding it but sometimes having the satisfaction of coming upon six or seven others which serve my purpose just as well.
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2.2 Books very easy to arrange
The big Jules Vernes in the red binding Journals of which you possess at least The PrĂŠsence du Futur series Very large books
Novels published by the Editions de Volumes in the PlĂŠiade collection Very small ones
Collections
Three issues
Baedekers
Mardbacks
Minuit
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Rare books or ones presumed to be so
Et cetera
2.3 Books not too difficult to arrange
Books on the cinema Whether essays on directors Albums of movie stars or shooting scripts South American novels Ethnology
Psychoanalysis Cookery books (see above) Directories (next to thephone) German Romantics books in the Que Sais-je? series (the problem being whether to arrange them all together or with the discipline they deal with) Et cetera
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2.4 Books just about impossible to arrange
The rest: for example, journals of which you possess only a single issue, or else La Campagne de 1812 en Russie by Clausewitz, translated from the German by M. BĂŠgouĂŤn, Captain-Commandant in the 31st Dragoons, Passed Staff College, with one map, Paris, Librairie Militaire R. Chapelot et Cie, 1900; or else fascicule 6 of Volume 91 (November 1976) of the Proceedings of the Modern Language Association of America (PMLA giving the programme for the 666 working sessions of the annual congress of the saidAssociation.
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2.5
Like the librarians of Babel in Borges’s story, who are looking for the book that will provide them with the key to all the others, we oscillate between the illusion of perfection and the vertigo of the unattainable. In the name of completeness, we would like to believe that a unique order exists that would enable us to accede in knowledge all in one go; in the name of the unattainable, we would like to think that order and disorder are in fact the same word, denoting pure chance.
It’s possible also that both are decoys, illusions intended to disguise the erosion of both books and systems. It is no bad thing in any case that between the two our bookshelves should serve from time to time as joggers of the memory, as cat-rests and as lumber-rooms.
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Information Key
Date Released
# of Stars Out of 5
# of Pages
Rank in Bestseller List
Above is the guide to how the rest of the pages are laid out and how that information should be read. Following you will find a list of books written by Chuck Palahniuk and information reguarding the date each book was released, how many stars out of 5 it has on Amazon, the number of pages each book contains and finally its ranking on Amazon’s bestseller list.
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Chuck Palahniuk
February 21, University of Oregon 1962
5’11”
Fiction Horror/Satire
Birth Univirsity Height Genre Charles Michael “Chuck” Palahniuk is an American novelist and freelance journalist, who describes his work as transgressional fiction. He is best known as the author of the award-winning novel Fight Club, which also was made into a feature film.
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Fight Club
August 17, 1996
4.5 a
224 pages
#1713 bestseller
The first rule about fight club is you don’t talk about fight club. Every weekend, in the basements and parking lots of bars across the country, young men with white-collar jobs and failed lives take off their shoes and shirts and fight each other barehanded just as long as they have to. Then they go back to those jobs with blackened eyes and loosened teeth and the sense that they can handle anything. Fight club is the invention of Tyler Durden, projectionist, waiter, and dark, anarchic genius, and it’s only the beginning of his plans for violent revenge on an empty consumer-culture world.
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“We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war.. our Great Depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.”
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Survivor
February 17, 1999
4.5 a
289 pages
#18,525 bestseller
Tender Branson—last surviving member of the Creedish Death Cult—is dictating his life story into Flight 2039’s recorder. He is all alone in the airplane, which will crash shortly into the vast Australian outback. But before it does, he will unfold the tale of his journey from an obedient Creedish child to an ultra-buffed, steroid- and collagen-packed media messiah. Unpredictable and unforgettable, Survivor is Chuck Palahniuk at his deadpan peak: a mesmerizing, unnerving, and hilarious satire on the wages of fame and the bedrock lunacy of the modern world.
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“To stand here and try and fix her life is just a big waste of time. People don’t want their lives fixed. Nobody wants their problems solved. Their dramas. Their distractions. Their stories resolved. Their messes cleaned up. Because what would they have left? Just the big scary unknown.”
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Invisible Monsters
September 1999
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4a
304 pages
#3,642 bestseller
The fashion-model protagonist of Invisible Monsters has just about everything: a boyfriend, a career, a loyal best friend. But one day she’s driving along the freeway when a sudden “accident” leaves her with half her face, no ability to speak, and next to no self-esteem. From being the beautiful center of attention she becomes an invisible monster, so hideous that no one will acknowledge she exists. Enter Brandy Alexander, Queen Supreme, one operation away from becoming a real woman; Brandy will teach her that reinventing yourself means erasing the past and making up something better. And that salvation hides in the last places you’ll ever want to look. In this hilarious and daringly unpredictable novel, the narrator must exact revenge upon Evie, her best friend and fellow model; kidnap Manus, her two-timing ex-boyfriend; and hit the road with Brandy in search of a brand-new past, present, and future. Changing names and stories in every city, they catapult toward a final confrontation with a rifle-toting Evie-by which time the narrator will have learned that loving and being loved are not mutually exclusive, and that nothing, on the surface, is ever quite what it seems. By turns witty, poignant, and exhilarating, Invisible Monsters will take you on a ride you’ll never forget.
“No matter how much you think you love somebody, you’ll step back when the pool of their blood edges up too close.”
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Choke
May 20, 2001
4a
304 pages
#4,178 bestseller
Victor Mancini, a medical-school dropout, is an antihero for our deranged times. Needing to pay elder care for his mother, Victor has devised an ingenious scam: he pretends to choke on pieces of food while dining in upscale restaurants. He then allows himself to be “saved” by fellow patrons who, feeling responsible for Victor’s life, go on to send checks to support him. When he’s not pulling this stunt, Victor cruises sexual addiction recovery workshops for action, visits his addled mom, and spends his days working at a colonial theme park. His creator, Chuck Palahniuk, is the visionary we need and the satirist we deserve.
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“We can spend our lives letting the world tell us who we are. Sane or insane. Saints or sex addicts. Heroes or victims. Letting history tell us how good or bad we are. Letting our past decide our future. Or we can decide for ourselves. And maybe it’s our job to invent something better.”
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Lullaby
September 17, 2002
4a
272 pages
#25,025 bestseller
Ever heard of a culling song? It’s a lullaby sung in Africa to give a painless death to the old or infirm. The lyrics of a culling song kill, whether spoken or even just thought. You can find one on page 27 of Poems and Rhymes from Around the World, an anthology that is sitting on the shelves of libraries across the country, waiting to be picked up by unsuspecting readers. Reporter Carl Streator discovers the song’s lethal nature while researching Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, and before he knows it, he’s reciting the poem to anyone who bothers him. As the body count rises, Streator glimpses the potential catastrophe if someone truly malicious finds out about the song. The only answer is to find and destroy every copy of the book in the country. Accompanied by a shady real-estate agent, her Wiccan assistant, and the assistant’s truly annoying ecoterrorist boyfriend, Streator begins a desperate cross-country quest to put the culling song to rest.
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“Every generation wants to be the last. Every generation hates the next trend in music they can’t understand. We hate to give up those reins of our culture. To find our own music playing in elevators. The ballad for our revolution, turned into background music for a television commercial. To find our generation’s clothes and hair suddenly retro.”
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Diary
August 26, 2003
3.5 a
272 pages
#20,116 bestseller
Misty Wilmot has had it. Once a promising young artist, she’s now stuck on an island ruined by tourism, drinking too much and working as a waitress in a hotel. Her husband, a contractor, is in a coma after a suicide attempt, but that doesn’t stop his clients from threatening Misty with lawsuits over a series of vile messages they’ve found on the walls of houses he remodeled. Suddenly, though, Misty finds her artistic talent returning as she begins a period of compulsive painting. Inspired but confused by this burst of creativity, she soon finds herself a pawn in a larger conspiracy that threatens to cost hundreds of lives. What unfolds is a dark, hilarious story from America’s most inventive nihilist, and Palahniuk’s most impressive work to date.
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“Leonardo’s Mona Lisa is just a thousand thousand smears of paint. Michelangelo’s David is just a million hits with a hammer. We’re all of us a million bits put together the right way.”
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Haunted
May 3, 2005
3.5 a
432 pages
#13,765 bestseller
Haunted is a novel made up of twenty-three horrifying, hilarious, and stomachchurning stories. They’re told by people who have answered an ad for a writer’s retreat and unwittingly joined a “Survivor”-like scenario where the host withholds heat, power, and food. As the storytellers grow more desperate, their tales become more extreme, and they ruthlessly plot to make themselves the hero of the reality show that will surely be made from their plight. This is one of the most disturbing and outrageous books you’ll ever read, one that could only come from the mind of Chuck Palahniuk.
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“The air will always be to filledwith something. Your body too sore or tired. Your father too drunk. Your wife too cold. You will always have some excuse not to live your life.�
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Rant
May 1, 2007
4a
336 pages
#26,395 bestseller
Buster “Rant� Casey just may be the most efficient serial killer of our time. A high school rebel, Rant Casey escapes from his small town home for the big city where he becomes the leader of an urban demolition derby called Party Crashing. Rant Casey will die a spectacular highway death, after which his friends gather the testimony needed to build an oral history of his short, violent life. With hilarity, horror, and blazing insight, Rant is a mind-bending vision of the future, as only Chuck Palahniuk could ever imagine.
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“We’ll never be as young as we are tonight.”
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Snuff
May 20, 2008
3a
208 pages
#165,415 bestseller
In the crowded greenroom of a porn-movie production, hundreds of men mill around in their boxers, awaiting their turn with the legendary Cassie Wright. An aging adult film star, Cassie Wright intends to cap her career by breaking the world record for serial fornication by having sex with 600 men on camera—one of whom may want to kill her. Told from the perspectives of Mr. 72, Mr. 137, Mr. 600, and Sheila, the talent wrangler who must keep it all under control, Snuff is a dark, wild, and lethally funny novel that brings the presence of pornography in contemporary life into the realm of literary fiction.
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“To hell with housework, our top priority has always been between our legs.”
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Pygmy
May 5, 2009
4.5 a
224 pages
#1713 bestseller
A gang of adolescent terrorists, a spelling bee, and a terrible plan masquerading as a science project: This is Operation Havoc. Pygmy is one of a handful of young adults from a totalitarian state sent to the US disguised as exchange students. Living with American families to blend in, they are planning an unspecified act of massive terrorism that will bring this big dumb country and its fat dumb inhabitants to their knees. Palahniuk depicts Midwestern life through the eyes of this indoctrinated little killer in a cunning double-edged satire of American xenophobia.
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“Real smarts begin when you quit quoting other people...”
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Tell-All
May 4, 2010
3a
192 pages
#15,787 bestseller
For decades Hazie Coogan has tended to the outsized needs of Katherine “Miss Kathie” Kenton, veteran of multiple marriages, career comebacks, and cosmetic surgeries. But danger arrives with gentleman caller Webster Carlton Westward III, who worms his way into Miss Kathie’s heart—and boudoir. Soon, Hazie discovers that this bounder has already written a celebrity memoir foretelling Miss Kathie’s death in an upcoming musical extravaganza. As the body count mounts, Hazie must execute a plan to save Katherine Kenton for her fans and for posterity.
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“In truth, the degree of anyone’s success depends on how often they can say the word yes and hear the word no.”
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Damned
September 1, 2011
3.5 a
256 pages
#2,312 bestseller
Madison is the thirteen-year-old daughter of a narcissistic film star and a billionaire. Abandoned at her Swiss boarding school over Christmas, she dies over the holiday, presumably of a marijuana overdose. The last thing she remembers is getting into a town car and falling asleep. Then she’s waking up in Hell. Literally. Madison soon finds that she shares a cell with a motley crew of young sinners: a cheerleader, a jock, a nerd, and a punk rocker, united by their doomed fate, like an afterschool detention for the damned. Together they form an odd coalition and march across the unspeakable landscape of Hell--full of used diapers, dandruff, WiFi blackout spots, evil historical figures, and one horrific call center--to confront the Devil himself.
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“Reread that Bronte book all you want, but Jane Eyre’s never going to get gender-reassignment surgery or train to become a kick-ass ninja assassin.”
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About The Project Is reading relevant? featuring Brief Notes on the Art and Manner of Arranging one’s Books is an experimental text. Combining Georges Prec’s notes on how to orgonize ones Books along with Derek Green’s personal collection of Chuck Palahniuk books. This was a college senior level assignment from Columbia College Chicago for an Advanced Typography class. A special thanks to Guy Villa for his guidance, input and making this project possible. Created in the Fall of 3013 using Adobe Indesign and Illustrator. All design work and research done by Derek Green and outsourced for printing to Blurb.
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The Author
Born in 1989 and raised in the Chicago land area, Derek Green is committed to hard work, education and a career in the graphic design industry. After completing an associates program at Harper College in Palatine, Illinois Derek relocated to Lincoln Park, Chicago. He enrolled in Columbia College Chicago’s graphic design program in the fall of 2011. He is an extremely motivated designer, punctual and sociable. When Derek isn’t attending classes or perusing his dreams he spends his time working full time as a fine dining server, going to concerts and building rela- tionships with trusted friends.
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