The Ministry of Reshelving

The Ministry of Reshelving wants to remind folks that we live under an administration of doublespeak for whom 2+2=5. To do this, they are relocating Orwell's novel 1984 in bookstores from "fiction" to "current events." From here and here:

This week, we launched the Ministry of Reshelving project. My partners in crime as founding members of the ministry: George, Kiyash, and Monica. This weekend we relocated 19 copies of George Orwell's 1984 in four different bookstores in Palo Alto, San Francisco, and Berkeley. It was high stealth adventure. You are invited to join our efforts.

How to Serve the Ministry of Reshelving

1. Select a local bookstore to carry out your reshelving activities.

2. Download and print "This book has been relocated by the Ministry of Reshelving" bookmarks and "All copies of 1984 have been relocated" notecards to take with you to the bookstore. Or make your own. We recommend bringing a notecard and 5-10 bookmarks to each store.

3. Go to the bookstore and locate its copies of George Orwell's 1984. Unless the Ministry of Reshelving has already visited this bookstore, it is probably currently incorrectly classified as "Fiction" or "Literature."

4. Discreetly move all copies of 1984 to a more suitable section, such as "Current Events", "Politics", "History", "True Crime", or "New Non-Fiction."

5. Insert a Ministry of Reshelving bookmark into each copy of any book you have moved. Leave a notecard in the empty space the books once occupied.

6. If you spot other incorrectly classified books, feel free to relocate them.

7. Please report all reshelving efforts to the Ministry. Email your store name, location, # of 1984 copies reshelved, and any other reshelving activities conducted, to reshelving @ avantgame.com. Photos of your mission can be uploaded to Flickr, tagged as "reshelving", and submitted to the Ministry of Reshelving group.

Our goal is to relocate one thousand nine hundred and eighty-four copies, and to complete successful reshelving of 1984 in all 50 United States. Global contributions are welcome.

MORE FROM the Book Standard:

Subversive Book Group Brings the Revolution to a Bookstore Near You by Rachel Deahl

If you walk into your local bookstore looking for a copy of George Orwell’s 1984, you may just happen upon a cryptic note in its place from a group called The Ministry of Reshelving.

Though they may sound like a gang of vigilante librarians, the Ministry, which was founded only 12 days ago, is in fact made up of people looking to make a sly political statement in a playful way. Their goal is to generate discussion and thought about the oppressive nature of the current United States presidential administration by moving 1,984 copies of George Orwell’s novel, 1984—the classic cautionary tale of “Big Brother,” an authoritarian government that rules by invasively monitoring its citizens—from its usual spot in the fiction section of bookstores to somewhere more “fitting,” like “Current Affairs” or “United States Politics.” The hope is that the group can mobilize people throughout the country to move copies within bookstores in all 50 states.

The Ministry’s blog outlines the group’s mission statement and tracks the progress of all those who are participating (anyone can join) with cheeky photos and written accounts of reshelving missions. The blog also features a list of “rules” about how the reshelving should occur, the most important of which indicating how the group’s telltale signature should be left. A bookmark, which reads, “This book has been relocated by the Ministry of Reshelving,” is to be placed in all moved copies of 1984, while a note card that says, “All copies of 1984 have been relocated,” must be placed in the former home of the Orwell books.

Jane McGonigal, a 27-year-old Ph.D. student at Univ. of Calif., Berkeley, and one of the founders of the group, says the idea for the Ministry grew out of a conversation she had with some friends at a recent dinner party. While discussing their frustration with the state of U.S. political affairs, McGonigal says she and her friends started to focus on the difficulty of engaging in honest and open dialogue on the topic. With that in mind, McGonigal and three friends—two of her Berkeley classmates and a documentary filmmaker—started The Ministry of Reshelving, with, she says, “an activist intent to raise awareness about the current administration’s lack of honesty with the public by highlighting how it resembles the doublespeak in 1984.”

McGonigal says that having the Ministry send its message through bookstores was ideal because they are, she says, the closest thing we have to a café culture. “It’s important to show that there are small things you can do to make a statement and bookstores are very much a public plaza for our time ... They’re places where people congregate.”

The other important thing for McGonigal in creating the Ministry was to make it fun. Given her background in the area of games and game theory—this is the focus of her degree in performance studies—McGonigal structured the reshelving like a game. Because members can email their activities (how many books they moved and where they did so) to McGonigal, who keeps a running tally on the group’s blog, there are incentives to engage people in the effort and there can also be clear “winners.”

Of course, not everyone thinks the Ministry’s work is amusing. Though McGonigal insists the group doesn’t want to create headaches for booksellers, some in the retail business aren’t very keen on having people move books to make political statements.

Robert Carroll, the inventory manager at the Contra Costa Borders in California, where a few books were reorganized by a Ministry member (who detailed his exploits on the group’s blog), said he didn’t know what the Ministry was when he spoke to The Book Standard; he did confirm, though, that other employees had left the group’s odd bookmarks on his desk. Stressing that he couldn’t speak for other Borders staffers, Carroll said the shuffling of titles is “a hassle” for him and his team.

Steven M. Cohen, who runs the blog LibraryStuff and featured a link to the Ministry’s website on his own homepage, says that despite his notice of the group, he thinks they have set out on “an outrageous and unaccomplishable task that will no doubt end up in the annals of some ‘bad ideas’ tome” because it’s so easy for booksellers to simply reshelve misplaced books.

“I thought the Ministry of Reshelving was a funny idea in bookstores, especially in stores that sell ‘new books’ sporting coffee stains or cookie crumbs,” say R.C. Rybnikar, an archivist at Babson College who discussed the group on his blog.

Bookseller Robert Gray, who works at Northshire Books in Manchester, Vt., says his bookstore is one step ahead of the Ministry. “Oddly enough, we already have copies of 1984 on a display near our current issues/history section, as well as in fiction.”