that, Iâll get you a coffee. I always bring a Thermos of coffee when I come in early. Drink up, itâll make you feel better. Believe me. Now just sit down there and donât bother me again, or Iâll get stressed. Even in small-town libraries like this, people make terrible mistakes in their shelving. It drives me up the wall, itâs a sign of how pathetic they are. Not only do they shut absent-minded readers into my basement at night, but they shelve the books all wrong as well. Because, theoretically, whether youâre in Paris, Marseille, Cahors, Mazamet or Dompierre-sur-Besbre, you ought to beable to find the same book in the same place. See, take a classic work of sociology, Ãmile Durkheimâs
The Division of Labour in Society
. Well, there it is, shelfmark 301. Next to
Suicide
. Thatâs another great classic by Durkheim:
Suicide
. Same author, same shelfmark: 301 DUR. Works every time. Canât go wrong. The man who invented this system, his name was Melvil Dewey. Heâs our founding father, for all us librarians. Just a little guy, from a poor family somewhere in America, and he was only twenty-one when he thought up the most famous classification system in the world. Dewey is the Mendeleev of librarians. Not the Periodic Table of Elements, but the classification of areas of culture. His stroke of genius was to divide up the areas of knowledge under ten broad headings he called âclassesâ: 000 for general works, 100 for philosophy, 200 for religions. 300 for social sciences, 400 for languages, 500 for mathematics, 600 for technology, 700 for fine art, 800 for literature, 900 for history and geography â and everything else they couldnât classify ends up here in the basement too. Yes, sorry, my coffee is always too strong, that way I donât getmy colleagues scrounging it off me. Well, Dewey called his system âthe Dewey decimal classificationâ. Simplicity itself. It was over a century ago. He had a right to be proud of himself: he had methodically arranged all human knowledge. That wasnât to be sniffed at. Because before that, let me tell you, it was completely erratic. They didnât just classify by author, they sometimes put books on the shelf by size, or date of acquisition. Now I come to think of it, the confusion it must have caused. Glad I didnât live then. I couldnât have put up with that kind of anarchy. Already my Geography section, as I was saying, is a sort of dustbin. They chuck in books on numismatics, military medals, genealogy, psychoanalysis, the occult ⦠Itâs a catch-all category. Which bothers me. I like nice clear-cut categories. See, over there, on the right, thatâs History. Personally, I like that section, in fact, I love it. But I was appointed to manage Geography and Town Planning, over here on the left. And let me tell you that between Geography and History, that is between the shelfmarks 910 and 930, thereâs a great gulf fixed. A symbolic line, not to be crossed. Infact, History takes up most of the space. It has virtually the whole of the 900s. Oh, I donât hold it against history, because Iâm fond of it. But I only get 900 and 910 for me, quite little ones. Not a lot, but just see what Dewey does with them, even if there are only a few books. Incredible. 910: General works of geography. 914: Geography of Europe. Then after the first three figures you put a decimal point, so the more detailed the idea is, the longer the shelfmark. Do you follow? And by the way, please donât drink the whole Thermos. So here we have 914.4: Geography of France. 914.43: Geography of the île de France region. Next along: 914.436: Geography of Paris. I could go on, nothing slips through the net of this classification. Itâs infallible. So to sum up, a shelfmark is between three and six figures long, after that you add the first three letters of the authorâs name.
Existentialism Is a
The Division of Labour in Society
. Well, there it is, shelfmark 301. Next to
Suicide
. Thatâs another great classic by Durkheim:
Suicide
. Same author, same shelfmark: 301 DUR. Works every time. Canât go wrong. The man who invented this system, his name was Melvil Dewey. Heâs our founding father, for all us librarians. Just a little guy, from a poor family somewhere in America, and he was only twenty-one when he thought up the most famous classification system in the world. Dewey is the Mendeleev of librarians. Not the Periodic Table of Elements, but the classification of areas of culture. His stroke of genius was to divide up the areas of knowledge under ten broad headings he called âclassesâ: 000 for general works, 100 for philosophy, 200 for religions. 300 for social sciences, 400 for languages, 500 for mathematics, 600 for technology, 700 for fine art, 800 for literature, 900 for history and geography â and everything else they couldnât classify ends up here in the basement too. Yes, sorry, my coffee is always too strong, that way I donât getmy colleagues scrounging it off me. Well, Dewey called his system âthe Dewey decimal classificationâ. Simplicity itself. It was over a century ago. He had a right to be proud of himself: he had methodically arranged all human knowledge. That wasnât to be sniffed at. Because before that, let me tell you, it was completely erratic. They didnât just classify by author, they sometimes put books on the shelf by size, or date of acquisition. Now I come to think of it, the confusion it must have caused. Glad I didnât live then. I couldnât have put up with that kind of anarchy. Already my Geography section, as I was saying, is a sort of dustbin. They chuck in books on numismatics, military medals, genealogy, psychoanalysis, the occult ⦠Itâs a catch-all category. Which bothers me. I like nice clear-cut categories. See, over there, on the right, thatâs History. Personally, I like that section, in fact, I love it. But I was appointed to manage Geography and Town Planning, over here on the left. And let me tell you that between Geography and History, that is between the shelfmarks 910 and 930, thereâs a great gulf fixed. A symbolic line, not to be crossed. Infact, History takes up most of the space. It has virtually the whole of the 900s. Oh, I donât hold it against history, because Iâm fond of it. But I only get 900 and 910 for me, quite little ones. Not a lot, but just see what Dewey does with them, even if there are only a few books. Incredible. 910: General works of geography. 914: Geography of Europe. Then after the first three figures you put a decimal point, so the more detailed the idea is, the longer the shelfmark. Do you follow? And by the way, please donât drink the whole Thermos. So here we have 914.4: Geography of France. 914.43: Geography of the île de France region. Next along: 914.436: Geography of Paris. I could go on, nothing slips through the net of this classification. Itâs infallible. So to sum up, a shelfmark is between three and six figures long, after that you add the first three letters of the authorâs name.
Existentialism Is a
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