Our books, arranged by Hue and Lightness

Sunday afternoons were made for doing this kind of thing…
Book drop
(click here for the biggest version)
Several thousand of our books, arranged vertically by hue and horizontally by lightness. The value was calculated by finding the average colour of the book cover and then converting that to the relevant HSL value. There’s a little bit of randomness thrown in too, in terms of rotation and position. The image was created using Perl and ImageMagick.
If nothing else, it shows that we have more red and blue books than green or pink ones!

6 thoughts on “Our books, arranged by Hue and Lightness”

  3. Dave,
    Amazing. Really artistic. Did you really go and arrange all those books and then reshelve afterwards?
    I also love the Hitchcock collage, brilliant. What software did you use for this? Do you need to do any programming (it’s beena while!) Also do you need thousands of images or can you get away with 10-20?

  4. Much as I’d love to have reshelved the stock by colour, I think our students would lynch me 🙂
    I’ve been using ImageMagick with Perl to analyse the book covers and then again to build the final collage.
    For this kind of thing, the more images you have, the better.
    There’s some useful links to other software on the LibraryThing blog.

  5. Hi Dave
    can you make one of these for just the Art & Design books, or teach me how…
    I’d love to have a print in the Trend Hub – Thanks
    Linda

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