The web of connections

Every book on this shelf carries a small set of explicit links to other books. There are 1,256 of them. They are made by hand, one at a time, and each one means something specific — not “these are both about finance,” which is what a tag is for, but that one book is the prequel to another, or refutes it, or describes the same mechanism in a different domain.

The links accumulate rather than being designed. A book arrives, it gets read, and the question is which of the 321 books already on the shelf it argues with. Most books attach to five or six. A few attach to twenty. And some attach to almost nothing, which is its own kind of information — books that connect to nothing are, in my experience, disproportionately books that said nothing.

About seventy-five of the pairs here point one way only. That is deliberate: a later book often comments on an earlier one that has nothing to say in return. Both pages show the link; only one of them claims it. There is more on the method in why I track the connections between books.