Sorted Books: Sorting Strindberg

"Sorted Books" is my longest ongoing project. It began in 1993 and has taken place on many different sites over the years, including in the private homes of friends, in rare book libraries, and in the archives of important literary figures. The process is the same in every case: I sort through a collection of books, make note of particular titles, and eventually group the books into clusters so that the titles can be read in sequence. The final results are most often shown as photographs of the book clusters, but on occasion, I exhibit the grouped books themselves. Taken as a whole, the clusters are a cross-section of that library's holdings that function as a kind of portrait.

While on a IASPIS residency in Stockholm in 2004, the Strindberg Museum generously gave me permission to work with August Strindberg's books. Strindberg had lived in a 4th-floor apartment, with an extra room on the 6th floor that housed his research library, his writing desk, and the majority of his books. The books were extremely fragile—they seemed to crumble with any contact or displacement, so I avoided contact entirely. I spent three days taking digital pictures and writing down book titles on notecards. Then I worked at home, shuffling around the hundreds of notecards to create the clusters and then crosschecking these against the digital pictures to make sure the physical properties of the books would work in these combinations. Although I grew up speaking Swedish, this was the first time I worked in a language other than English, and 19th-century Swedish spelling sometimes brought its own challenges and misunderstandings.

Working posthumously with a famous writer raised new questions: was the goal to write in Strindberg's voice and to somehow channel him through his books? Was I obligated to express his opinions, or was there space for my own? Did the clusters need to reflect topics from the era of his life or mine? The breadth of Strindberg's interests was immense. If nothing else, I wanted my book clusters to do justice to Strindberg's omnivorous intellectual appetite, and I felt happiest when this diversity could be reflected within just a single photograph.