Last September I was tasked with the project of giving an LAUSD school library a classification makeover. Like most libraries, this one was built on Dewey decimal classification and was, like most libraries, feeling the dire effects of using an outdated and inherently colonial system in 2025. Nonfiction books—which are most of the books catalogued with Dewey numbers; novels use the label “FIC” instead of a number—were organized in an order not immediately (or ever) logical, and received little circulation.

There were other distinct characteristics of the library that made upkeep of the collection challenging. For one, it was huge, way bigger than any K-12 school library I’d been in. Most school libraries are managed by a single librarian, which makes more sense when the library is smaller. But this one had over 25,000 books, and probably another couple thousand missing from the digital inventory—over double the average collection size in a California school library. The teacher-librarian here had too many day-to-day duties to thoroughly reclassify an entire collection of the nonfiction books, which came to around 10,000.

Along with the extensive collection was also a wide range in audience. The library was open to around 2,650 students across grades 6 to 12. That meant the books themselves also had to range from middle grade to upper grade. And in terms of physical space, the History section was tucked into the east corner farthest from the circulation desk, where the overhead lights had been broken for a long time. Books on topics like the Civil Rights Movement and South African apartheid were trapped in eerie shadow. Students usually went there to vape or make out (which personally I was OK with, but I wasn’t the librarian). One security guard liked to hang out in that corner alone during school hours, sometimes positioning two large wall-boards in the aisle spaces as barricades so that no one could pass through. So, the History shelves were a mess.

When I started the project, the teacher-librarian and I imagined a quickish cleanup. Books were all over the place in strange groupings and I was to put them together in a way that made more sense. For example, the nonfiction section began with aliens and Bigfoot. Right next to that was computer science. The computer science books were far away from the other ones about computers and technology in the section called…“Technology.” Then there was a Guinness World Records from 2021. Then there were the philosophical writings of Voltaire. Then we had aliens and Bigfoot again for some reason. Then there were a bunch of books on anxiety and depression.

The insane thing was, that’s exactly how the Dewey decimal system worked. 001.9, “Controversial knowledge.” 004, “Computer science.” 031, “General encyclopedic works in American English.” 100, “Philosophy.” 133, “Specific topics in parapsychology and occultism.” 150, “Psychology.” Maybe in a large public library there would have been more books classified with the in-between numbers to bridge the different topics together more easily, but a school library didn’t need that many numbers. The bigger issue was that there were so many specific subcategories that assigning a call number for them seemed to depend on the cataloguer’s interpretation of the book’s subject. That was why some alien and Bigfoot books went in “Controversial knowledge” while others went in “Parapsychology and occultism.” While I saw somewhat the logic of either category, I thought maybe these books, with their fun fonts and crazy-looking photos, shouldn’t be closer to books about not killing yourself than books on other creatures and legends (398.2, “Folk literature”).

In my university department library I found the 12th edition of the DDC, or the Decimal Classification and Relativ Index: for libraries and personal use in arranjing for immediate reference books, pamflets, clippings, pictures, manuscript notes and other material. This edition was the earliest one we had; it was published in 1927 and certainly seemed to have been preserved from that time. The pages were brittle and yellow. I was aware of the balminess of my fingertips as I delicately thumbed through them.

I began reading and immediately thought I was having a stroke. I knew Mevil Dewey was a fan of simplified spelling, but I hadn’t realized he had actually written his DDC manuals in that way. On the copyright page was the following note:

Speling

Simpler spelings ar strongly recommended for jeneral adoption by both American and English filolojic associations, including nearly all prominent skolars in English now living. We regret prejudis which certain uzers wil feel against these chanjes, but after careful study of all objections urjd, we find the weight of scholarship, reason and economy wholy in their favor, and feel compeld to bear a share of the prejudis which sum must endure before the great benefits of a rational orthografy can be secured…See, at end of Introduction, p. 49-63, summary of compeling reazons for making these chanjes, and code of brief rules. Read them before criticizing our shorter and much better speling.

The rest of the book was written like this. He must have gotten a lot of complaints, because his next publication only two years later in 1929, the fourth edition of the Abridged Decimal Classification and Relativ Index, returned to a slightly less schizophrenic spelling.