Classifying fictions : libraries and information sciences and the practice of complete reading

It has been argued that ‘literature has no taxonomic system [. . .] only a con- fused aggregate of overlapping classifications from different points of view’. This, too, is the case for fiction holdings in libraries, which are subject to a range of diversified and decentralised systems, approaches, and procedures. No method of classifying fiction has achieved the level of satisfaction necessary to produce a standard practice. Indeed, librarian Gregg Sapp identified fiction as ‘the most misunderstood of all library materials’. He argued that ‘the apparent impossibility of conceptually classifying fiction has led librarians to establish more objective criteria for providing for its retrieval, such as the author’s name, nationality, or period of activity. By doing this, librarians do not so much classify fiction as organize it’. The distinction between classification and organisation may seem slight, but recourse to an expedient is necessarily significant: organisation is a surrogate, introduced in reaction to a specific kind of book material too intractable to be handled in any other way. Fiction classification is not only an instrumental operation under- taken by libraries on behalf of their patrons; it is also, as Sapp suggests, an encounter with the particularly problematic character of fiction books. The impasse is revealing: it indicates the singularity of fiction as a book work among others