Dear library and bookstore colleagues:

For our forthcoming special issue, “Breaking the Rules,” the Horn Book Magazine is looking for examples of DIY book cataloging, classification, shelving, and display. That is, we want to see cases in which you broke your own rules of what-goes-where in order to give a book a better chance of meeting its readers. Whether it’s a mingling of fiction, poetry, and memoir on a “books to make you cry” shelf; or a collection of sex ed books situated so a reader can find them in privacy; or an arrangement of book spines in the order of the rainbow, we want to see them. And we want to come and take pictures of them, so this plea for subversive cataloging is going out particularly to our friends and subscribers in the Greater Boston area. You show us your shelves and we’ll buy you ice cream.

If you do have some end-run around Dewey, LC, or Western epistemological systems in general, please write to me at rsutton at hbook.com and we’ll get in touch.