Eminent Library Figures
Authors: Kelly Michelle 
Published: October 2020

“K29.” One day it will be me (oh please let it be so). When I’m K29, it will mean that my book is on the shelf of a library which has a collection large enough to employ the Cutter-Sanborn Three Figure Author Table so that it might translate “Kelly” to code. K29 grates a little, sure—I’d prefer the visually softer, assonantal, sonorous J88 for Joy, or the zippiness of Laâbi’s L111—but that’s just a personal preference.

K29, J88, L111: divested of their link to authors’ surnames, it can be argued that Cutter-Sanborn numbers have a particular relationship to the practice of “scanning” as a mode of reading. These numbers are available to two types of scanning (in fact, they are perhaps available only to scanning and not “reading”). On a superficial level, they promote the scan which is purely pragmatic: the brief glimpse or glance, a looking which does not know or care what the number represents. Or they may be subject to the analytical scan which is an act of scrutiny, or interrogation. That is to say, while the Cutter-Sanborn number is open to decipherment, it is constitutionally affective (“sonorous”, “zippy”) and effective (as a library tool) for everyone, even those disinterested in its deeper codified meaning. This essay considers what a superficial scan of the Cutter-Sanborn number could signify for all who encounter it, and offers an idiosyncratic account of the possibilities of deeper, scrutinising signification, in particular its ramifications for the author it contracts.

The author number is the heart of the book number, and the Cutter-Sanborn number is a particular type—indeed a paradigm—of the author number. It is used especially by libraries employing Dewey Decimal Classification (Lehnus 76). The book number is designed to sub-arrange books which share the same classification number, and is thus formed by those letters and figures which follow the classification number. Abdellatif Laâbi’s L’arbre de fer fleurit, for example, is represented by the call number 848.9964 L111 E 1 at the University of Sydney Library: 848.9964 is a subdivision within the Dewey class of 848 for French miscellaneous writings; L111 E 1 is the book number, broadly conceived. Accordingly, the overall call number structure is worldly, then parochial. Book numbers thus create and express the singularity of books within an institution which, through classification, create and range a community of books. Book numbers are assigned on the basis of the library’s extant collection: new acquisitions are inserted around those numbers already bestowed. Lisa Zhao writes “We have to accept the shelflist (sic.) we have” (116), and thus numbers may vary for the same books at different libraries. Book numbers, it may be seen, are designations of philosophical, textual, and bibliographic consequence.

The Cutter-Sanborn number is derived from a table that numerates letter combinations in order to maintain an alphabetical arrangement on the shelves. Charles Cutter printed the first of several versions of his author number scheme in 1880; Kate Emery Sanborn later revised it to produce the Table’s most popular edition (Lehnus 18, 37-42). The Cutter-Sanborn number’s familiar contemporary form is a first initial followed by two, three, or more digits. No matter what a patron knows about the Cutter-Sanborn number, it will be impossible to miss the number’s recurring formal feature of lopsidedness. The mnemonic initial is consistently overpowered by a splatter of integers. Numbers appear as the furthered refinement. The single letter becomes almost incidental—a blunted, rudimentary, and superseded signifier—against a run of figures which seem more attenuating, demanding, or sophisticated. The Cutter-Sanborn number seems to suggest that the numbers enhance the letters, but it is an enhancement which denies the patron easy intelligibility. It substitutes a number for a name it still hints at with a first initial, and the precision of this former device creates a designation that looks like a measure of the book. This conception is facilitated by the everyday scanning eye undertaking a traversing kind of interpretation, not a probing one.

Why should the critic probe any deeper than this: why disturb the Cutter-Sanborn number beyond remarking on its simple utility and its affective scientism? Because of the Cutter-Sanborn number’s own pretensions. Conceived by Charles Cutter, the Cutter number was instrumental in the book number’s task of ensuring that “every volume has its own mark, shared with no other volume, its proper name, by which it is absolutely identified” (quoted in Lehnus, 9). The discourse surrounding the genesis of Cutter numbers was thus one of radical individuality. In spite of not being easily legible, the Cutter number hoped to be a kind of translation: Melvil Dewey, for instance, claimed that author numbers “are significant like our class numbers, and translate themselves into the name” (quoted in Lehnus, 27). The Cutter number is historically implicated by its optimistic aspirations of absolute identification, translation, and comprehensibility. This optimism has served it well—a Library Journal editorial blithely suggested that a new innovation “may be the best idea since Cutter numbers” (Berry III, 96)—but it has also obscured investigation of the way in which the Cutter-Sanborn number functions by presupposing its own adequacy.

‘Cuttered’, the author mark holds that said author may be satisfactorily equated with their name, which may be satisfactorily equated with a number. The author has their proper name converted for and contributed to another “proper name” (Cutter’s exact words), that of the volume. This latter proper name is claimed to be superior: “more exact,” suggests Dewey, “than a full written title, as it specifies the identical copy” (Dewey, 296). It is a proper name, then, which is motivated by a blinkered allegiance to the limitable unit and presence of the book. Jacques Derrida, in explaining the replacement of the proper name of a particular author with the designation “Sarl”—an acronym of Société à responsabilité limitée (Society with Limited Responsibility), bestowed so as to acknowledge all the named and unnamed signatures bearing upon the article under question—declares “I hope that the bearers of proper names will not be wounded by this technical or scientific device” (36). I would like to suggest that this is a sentiment that may also be applicable for book authors whose names have been “translated” into Cutter numbers, albeit that the library is more insouciant in expressing any repentance for its actions.

The Cutter number format accounts for the book in particular standardising ways, which authors’ names have connotative apparatus (biography, contingency, etymology) to prevent. Derrida recognises his renaming may affront the author, but does not try in any way to mitigate this indignity. He does no more than express the hope that if he did in fact wound the author, that this wasn’t the case. The corollary of this position is that any injury is worthwhile, or has been compensated for elsewhere. The author number’s result is nothing less than an expression of confidence in the viability of transacting a human proper name. A “transaction” concludes something: that something would be concluded was inevitable from the moment that Cutter’s words “by which [the volume] is absolutely identified” established the book number’s precept of satisfaction. The Cutter-Sanborn number concludes a care for human susceptibility: the wound Derrida excises is an ego celebrated in paragraph one and now (I wish to say fully) relinquished. In these very particular book number places—on the shelf-marker, on the spine, and on the sticker—a reduced human authority is proposed.

The Cutter-Sanborn number is a text with the express purpose to create an author who has limited ability to claim, and limited ability to connote. In the Cutter-Sanborn number, the book’s author is only just present. They may be able to be traced, but I would like to suggest that in the Cutter number the author is presented without spoil (that is, presented without the rot or reward attendant upon the contingencies and connotations of a human proper name). Consider, furthermore, the genesis of individual Cutter-Sanborn numbers themselves. Any Cutter-Sanborn number has Cutter and Sanborn as ur-authors, but individual authors—working in libraries everywhere—have no means of claiming the number they allocate as their own. The Cutter-Sanborn number simultaneously proposes reduced individual authority and enacts reduced individual authority. The Cutter-Sanborn number is thus available for use by critical textual practices sincerely and self-reflexively, both as an alternative authorial designation (traceable, connotative but standardising, international but relative), and as a model in the task of re-imagining authorship.

There is, however, a complicating factor. The Cutter-Sanborn number has proven bibliographically mobile. Its form of an initial followed by digits has been adapted to denote not only authors but titles, topics, subjects, place names, and even publication dates. For example, in the call number of a book entitled Power Sales Presentations: Complete Sales Dialogues for Each Critical Step of the Sales Cycle, a Cutter number P74 stands for the topic “Presentations” (O’Neill). The Cutter-Sanborn number format assimilates book features, it is slippery. In these assorted adaptations, the Cutter-Sanborn number manifests bibliographic features indiscriminately. However incomprehensible the number may appear at each individual occurrence, as a fabrication it does indeed always broadcast various measures of the book. The author’s proper name is thus potentially reduced to just one factor among many: other factors may be given equal leverage. (It is only now that the full consequence of the Cutter-Sanborn number’s sophistication is becoming evident: for devotees of these factors, in particular the author, its totalising representation veers towards sophistry.) A single initial followed by a splatter of integers, which could refer to any bibliographic thing? The Cutter-Sanborn number is an agitator: imprecise in its target, but utterly confident in the genius of its own designative force. The Cutter-Sanborn number does not encourage the scanning, probing eye to look closely, but upon investigation one can discern its paradoxical attempt to challenge author authority while trying to cement its own.

Subject to two different types of scanning eye, the Cutter-Sanborn number and its wider contextual environment of the book number destabilise and reconfigure ideas of authorship, simultaneously reducing and promoting it. These doubly scannable codes—these eminent library figures—have implications for the reading of books themselves. In textualising and deprioritising the author, in varying according to location, and in mitigating the grand narratives of classification, the book number has a stake in postmodern expression. And so this essay has been cautionary: it is wary of claiming or promoting book number literacy because of these very evidences of decentralisation. But this relativity is not a problem, as the book number is a thing so saturated in code that a degree of unintelligibility is in fact integral to its message. Unintelligibility need not be white noise. The book number is available to be read impressionistically—that is, available to be read in a manner somewhere between the two paradigmatic scanning cases of those indifferent and those intrigued. A fiction book from a scholarly archive stamped and stickered 853.91 C168 J8 T 1—the example is Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller—is a different text to the version marked F-CAL from a local library. The first example’s complex denotation and brute extent does not so well accommodate the accessible and leisured reading suggested by the second. Calvino from the local is on my time, and its direct address—F-CAL, Fiction: Calvino—is integral in facilitating this.

This observation reveals that book number analysis cannot be trusted for any reason, other than that of the Cutter-Sanborn number’s refusal to coalesce adequately across libraries and submit to investigation. Book number analysis is suspect too because, in explaining parts of the book number’s code, analysis pollutes the same experience’s affective value. The loss is significant, as innocence or ignorance is not easily regained. It is ironic that this essay—itself a measured study—must in the final analysis refuse the polarity of the two modes of scan initially posited as exemplary for encountering book numbers (the unaffected glance; the probing need to intuit and ramify), in order to reinstitute and advocate a mode of experience that the book number, within its stipulated self, excludes: susceptibility, a mere responsiveness to presence.

References

Berry III, John N. “Certification: Is It Worth the Price?” Editorial. Library Journal 15 Feb. 2001: 96.

Cutter-Sanborn Three-Figure Author Table: Swanson-Swift Revision, 1969. Chicopee, Ma: H. R. Huntting, 1969.
Derrida, Jacques. “Limited Inc a b c…” Trans. Samuel Weber. Glyph 2 (1977). Rpt. in Limited Inc. By Derrida. Evanston, Il: Northwestern UP, 1988.
Dewey, Melvil. “Eclectic Book-Numbers.” Library Journal 11 (1886): 296-301.
Laâbi, Abdellatif. L’arbre de fer fleurit: Poémes (1972). Paris: Oswald, 1974.
Lehnus, Donald J. Book Numbers: History, Principles, and Application. Chicago: ALA, 1980.
O’Neill, Edward T. “Cuttering for the Library of Congress Classification.” Annual Review of OCLC Research 1994 1 Jul. 2005. http://digitalarchive.oclc.org/da/ViewObject.jsp? fileid=0000002650:000000058648&reqid=701>.
Zhao, Lisa. “Save Space for ‘Newcomers’ – Analyzing Problems in Book Number Assignment under the LCC System.” Cataloging & Classification Quarterly 38.1 (2004): 105-19.

Citation reference for this article

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Kelly, Michelle. "Eminent Library Figures: A Reader." M/C Journal 8.4 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0508/07-kelly.php>.
APA Style
Kelly, M. (Aug. 2005) "Eminent Library Figures: A Reader," M/C Journal, 8(4). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0508/07-kelly.php>.