Poetry and plays in library classification

[Cudzoziemiec]

Why are poetry and plays shelved with non-fiction? I assumed it was an oddity of the Dewey decimal system so asked a librarian, who turned out to have recently arrived from Cape Town. She told me that the DD system gives poetry and plays their own category and in SA they are given their own section of shelving; but in UK libraries they are shelved with non-fiction. So, why? Because surely they're a form of fiction?

[Ian H]

Is this fiction?

WOULD I could cast a sail on the water   
Where many a king has gone   
And many a king’s daughter,   
And alight at the comely trees and the lawn,   
The playing upon pipes and the dancing,            5
And learn that the best thing is   
To change my loves while dancing   
And pay but a kiss for a kiss.   
 
I would find by the edge of that water   
The collar-bone of a hare     10
Worn thin by the lapping of water,   
And pierce it through with a gimlet and stare   
At the old bitter world where they marry in churches,   
And laugh over the untroubled water   
At all who marry in churches,     15
Through the white thin bone of a hare.

[Cudzoziemiec]

I'd say so, yes. It's a product of imagination, not facts and information. It's not what I think of as non-fiction. According to Dewey it's neither fiction nor non-fiction, assuming the librarian I spoke to was correct.

[pcolbeck]

I'd say so, yes. It's a product of imagination, not facts and information. It's not what I think of as non-fiction. According to Dewey it's neither fiction nor non-fiction, assuming the librarian I spoke to was correct.

Surely the script for a play is non-fiction. It's an instruction manual for putting on the play. A play when performed is fiction, or at least can be it could of course be historically accurate in which case it would be a live action documentary).

[Clare]

Poetry sits in the 800s in Dewey, along with other literature.

[Ian H]

I'd say so, yes. It's a product of imagination, not facts and information. It's not what I think of as non-fiction. According to Dewey it's neither fiction nor non-fiction, assuming the librarian I spoke to was correct.

Fiction is surely an invented story, whereas the Collarbone of a Hare is a musing on imagination—if only I could do this.   

[Cudzoziemiec]

Poetry sits in the 800s in Dewey, along with other literature.

That makes it all the more curious.

[Cudzoziemiec]

I'd say so, yes. It's a product of imagination, not facts and information. It's not what I think of as non-fiction. According to Dewey it's neither fiction nor non-fiction, assuming the librarian I spoke to was correct.

Surely the script for a play is non-fiction. It's an instruction manual for putting on the play. A play when performed is fiction, or at least can be it could of course be historically accurate in which case it would be a live action documentary).

Script as instruction manual is an interesting way of looking at it. It would never have occurred to me to think of it like that. I guess the same could apply to sheet music.

I don't think that historical accuracy is relevant though. Lots of plays, poems and novels are historically accurate, but it doesn't make them non-fiction IMO any more than errors in a history book make it fiction.

I'd say so, yes. It's a product of imagination, not facts and information. It's not what I think of as non-fiction. According to Dewey it's neither fiction nor non-fiction, assuming the librarian I spoke to was correct.

Fiction is surely an invented story, whereas the Collarbone of a Hare is a musing on imagination—if only I could do this.   

I'm not sure you can have invention without imagination. But that applies to inventions such as machines as well, and they can be fictional or non-fictional. I suppose you could say something like the Charge of the Light Brigade is a non-fictional poem because it tells of a real event (even if it's historically inaccurate) and the Lady of Shalott is a poem telling an invented story. Or you could say it's also based on historical events, maybe, but even if they really happened, it doesn't claim to tell them in the way they happened. Enough Tennyson anyway!

[jsabine]

I think if you're equating "non-fiction" with "not fiction" that's probably a category error - I'd see "non-fiction" as, basically, "factual," so history, biography, atlases, photography manuals ...

I'd put creative works like poetry and plays in a different box - probably even 'transcript' plays like Stuff Happens or The Permanent Way.

That said, I'd probably be happy enough to put books of photographs, even artistic ones (no, not *that* sort of artistic!) into "non-fiction" in a way I wouldn't with a poetry anthology. Not sure what the difference is - perhaps it's because so many photographic collections have a theme, whether that's trains or landscapes or women (I'm thinking specifically of the Annie Liebowitz volume here), that it introduces a documentary element to the photos rather than allowing them to be judged purely artistically, purely as images.

[Cudzoziemiec]

I think I have the same understanding of "non-fiction". But then I see poetry in the non-fiction section and think, that's not non-fiction, so it has to be fiction. Or more generally, non-fiction is based on facts and aims to impart those facts, to inform and educate. Everything else is fiction; it might also be fact-based but it's aim is different and it isn't purely facts. Possibly a different category error. Possibly the library understanding is fiction = stuff which tells a story, non-fiction = other stuff.

Clare says poetry is classified with literature, which further muddies the waters for me. What then is literature? Anything written can be literature, but unless specified it implies to me primarily fiction. Clearly writing about literature is non-fiction – literary criticism, textual analysis and so on – but literature itself? Often of course the two are in the same volume.

Anyway, the fiction shelves of libraries are not stocked alphabetically by author in one straight series; they have subdivisions, such as sci-fi, crime, graphic novels, short stories. I'm not a great fan of minute classification but poems and plays seem to me to be obvious and valid divisions and that's where I would put them. But the main thing I guess is that they are in the library and we can find them somehow.

[Clare]

Ah, I was basing my response on the shelving in the Uni Library which is my local library. If I want a fiction book I go the the third floor where the 800's are. We don't have separate 'Fiction' and 'Non-fiction', everything is classified by Dewey.

[Cudzoziemiec]

So between Uni of Clareville, City of Bristol and Cape Town, we have three different systems, all Dewey-based.