book labels

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This book label design by Valerie Madill made me look. Interesting concept for vast personal or big public libraries. No?

14 Comments leave a comment below

  1. nice idea, but maybe for pubic places, yes. i love the merge of colours that my books make in my book shelf. Someone told me some time ago that books are a fetish object, they smell, have texture, colours…

  2. oooh, wow! very organized and very pretty. . .if only i had time time and patience.

  3. Immensely logical, especially with the colour-coding, but I could never live in a world where books a de-faces so blatantly. Maybe if these tags were an inch wide on the spine with more info on the inside cover.

  4. this is from Emily Carr’s grad show in Vancouver – stopped by about a month ago!

  5. These are very cool. It would be neat if they had less meticulous versions for personal collections, adding things like where you got it from and how you rate it.

  6. Very interesting indeed. I just can’t imagine there would ever be a day i would be that organized!

  7. Great idea but I still do not know if I would swop my loved and messy bookshelf for an organised one. There is something about going through book by book to find the one you are looking for…

  8. I don’t know. What’s the point? Not only do they deface the book (you can’t see the covers!!), but all they seem to provide is information that can be easily gained by something as simple as opening the book. So, really, what’s the point? It gives information that is already available in the volume you hold in your hands, or that can be easily figured out (in the case of the citation entries) — and all this in the form of large, cover-occluding labels.

    That said, I am a big fan of ordering my own voluminous personal library by the dewey decimal system.

  9. They would look great to section off a years worth of magazines and keep them in order – I love a bit of a manic library system at home…OCD I think xx

  10. ooo, pretty. however, i don’t like the idea of defacing the books. maybe try it with holograms or projection lcds. wait, nevermind, that’s just silly.

  11. This would be good for my children’s book shelf.Maybe they would put the books back where they belong??

  12. i’d love these labels for my at home library, but with info like: when/where did you get it, when did you read it, etc. etc. the exposed part could be read as basic as: fiction, nonfiction, poetry, et al. and it seems like a simple way to add that colorizing factor to your bookshelf with out actually colorizing your books.

    i wouldn’t call this “defacing” however. it’s only a few inches on the bottom of the spine!

  13. i’d love these labels for my at home library, but with info like: when/where did you get it, when did you read it, etc. etc. the exposed part could be read as basic as: fiction, nonfiction, poetry, et al. and it seems like a simple way to add that colorizing factor to your bookshelf with out actually colorizing your books.

    i wouldn’t call this “defacing” however. it’s only a few inches on the bottom of the spine!

  14. Excellent idea! This would definitely add a level of organization to a home library. I like the fact that these labels (probably not the best way to describe them) can replace book-ends. Also, a very nice way to “highlight” the subjects of books in a library where some other principle of classification is used.