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# Quotes about order and disorder
- URL: https://www.lorcandempsey.net/quotes-about-order-and-disorder/
- Published: 2005-04-10T11:15:25.000Z
- Updated: 2022-12-07T02:32:29.000Z
- Author: Lorcan Dempsey
- Tags: Systems

Order seems very much a part of the public perception of the library, often counterposed to the potential disorder of the materials themselves. I was struck by this looking at recent entries.  
I [mention](https://blog.oclc.org/lorcand/archives/000623.html?ref=lorcandempsey.net) *aura* below. I plan to come back to Benjamin’s discussion of aura in a future post, pulling in his discussion of books in his essay ‘Unpacking my library’. In that essay, he notes:

> “The only exact knowledge there is,” said Anatole France, “is the date of publication and the format of books.” And indeed, if there is a counterpart to the confusion of the library, it is the order of its catalogue.” \[from the essay ‘Unpacking my library’ in the collection [Illuminations](https://search.yahoo.com/search?vs=worldcatlibraries.org&p=illuminations+walter+benjamin&ei=UTF-8&ref=lorcandempsey.net)\]

I noted Fintan O’Toole’s image of the chicken coop in the last entry:

> The struggle of libraries since then has been to categorise knowledge in as comprehensive a manner as possible. A library at one level is like an orderly chicken-coop, where the books sit brooding in their neat rows of nests. But every library user, on the other hand, is a fox among those chickens, frightening the established order of knowledge into panic-stricken scatterings. … \[Fintan O’Toole quoted in [Lorcan Dempsey’s weblog](https://blog.oclc.org/lorcand/archives/000624.html?ref=lorcandempsey.net)\]