It is now commonplace among critical librarians to observe the politics of the organization of knowledge in libraries. We have come to recognize the weight of the problems inherent in organizing materials by subject categories, as well as the ways in which our profession is entangled with government institutions like the Library of Congress, and the implications of the universalization of the white, cis-male, propertied subject across our systems. At the same time, we realize that the labour required to make significant changes is insurmountable, particularly during a moment in which cataloguing departments are shrinking, and that most proposed ‘solutions’ cannot address the most troubling systemic problems. It can be disheartening to realize our own limitations in changing the structures we work and live by.

I am convinced that dismantling systems that support patriarchy requires not simply updating, revising, or adding to them, but inhabiting and re-inscribing spaces using techniques and language from outside of those systems. This involves taking the idea of a maker-space/incubator into the entire library, into the stacks themselves to work intimately with the textures of the books and to nurture relationships. We might rethink our ideas about repairing library classifications so that we consider feminist and personal processes that privilege the local, interrogate standards, and explicitly foreground the aesthetics of knowledge organization. An intentional and creative engagement with feminist histories and practices in the public space of a library carries great potential for facilitating projects toward new ideas and political discourse.

In my own wanderings in the history of cataloguing research, I encountered a reference to a woman named Pamphila, a miscellanist who lived in 1^st century Greece, during Nero's reign.Footnote ¹ Some might call her an encyclopedist or a historian, but she is an important hidden figure in the history of knowledge organization. She wrote a massive thirty-three volume history, the title of which has been translated as a Collection of Historical Reminiscences, Historical Commentaries, or Historical Notes. I will suggest that we might regard Pamphila as an early feminist cataloguer, who, instead of organizing her histories according to categories, introduced a method derived from weaving and embroidery. Her organizational method privileged beauty and pleasure, along with historical accuracy and usefulness.

Indeed, women from ancient times wove knowledge into tapestries, garments, and texts. Textile practices were infused throughout Greek everyday life, intellectual culture, and myth as acts of storytelling, refusal, and resilience. They were techniques that organized cultural narratives and history. The list of weavers and embroiderers is astonishingly long, and in fact, we can find them around the world throughout historical periods up to the present. While outside of the scope of this paper, we could also consider textiles as indigenous techniques that could be applied toward decolonizing library spaces.

One might consider Ariadne, who led Theseus out of the Minotaur's labyrinth with a ball of thread, or Penelope who wove and unwove her cloth daily to keep her suitors away while she waited for Odysseus to return. Mary Beard has been telling us about the silencing of women in ancient times, but she also shows us ways that women reclaim their voice. Like Philomela, who lost her tongue, but still managed to denounce her rapist by weaving the story into a tapestry.Footnote ² On the one hand, weaving has been historically regarded as women's work, and was a labour that confined women to the home by positioning her at the loom. Take, for example, Telemachus's command to his mother Penelope:

At the same time, textiles have been a medium for women to record and represent the events of their lives. Bringing this technique into the very public space of the library, to record and portray reading practices and tastes, might be a creative avenue for responding to and resisting the patriarchal structures that divide and discipline our libraries.

Pamphila's name suggests all-love, and indeed, it seems her collection was intended to be universal in scope. She was of Egyptian descent, but lived and was probably born in Epidaurus, the small city famous for its acoustically perfect theatre, the mythical birthplace of Apollo's son Asclepius, and the healing sanctuary known as the Asclepeion. All evidence of Pamphila's life and work has been delivered to us by way of men's interpretations of eleven fragments. Her own work has now disappeared, but her fragments are cited in the histories of Photius, Diogenes Laertius, and Aulus Gellius. The Suda features a brief entry about her and indicates that she authored other texts, including one called On Sex.Footnote ⁴ Those, too, are lost, and their authorship is the subject of scholarly debate.

Photius of Constantinople (9^th c.) provides the most detailed account of her histories, based on her own accounts. He first explains that Pamphila wrote down the histories that she learned from her husband:

Another translation conveys this a bit differently: ‘thinking that mixture and variety (ποικιλία) were more pleasant and graceful than division by single topic.’Footnote ⁶

Admittedly, it is impossible to know very much about Pamphila, but from these reports of fragments, it seems we find an early radical cataloguer, whose technique was associated with the domestic space, the loom, and embroidery. In other words, her histories were organized according to what would have been regarded as feminine practices and principles in her era. We are told that she recorded the stories that she heard in her household. In fact, there was a question of authorship—scholars have attributed authorship to her husband, arguing that these stories were told among men, and that she merely wrote them down. Indeed, in our current era of #MeToo, in which we are observing and reversing the erasure of women's work in the history of science and culture, this attempt to dismiss Pamphila's contribution is particularly poignant. As Ian Michael Plant suggests, ‘It may have been a misreading of the prologue, along with the widespread misogynistic view of women writers in Greek society that led to the attribution of her work by some ancient commentators to her father or husband.’Footnote ⁷

I am most interested in connecting this erasure to her approach to organizing information to consider what we might learn if we include Pamphila in the history of knowledge organization. Pamphila recorded the stories in the order in which they came to her, and she did so in a way that was meant to please the reader. Her method was compared to a tapestry or embroidery. Pamphila's ordering principles are regarded by Jason König and Tim Whitmarsh as evidence of her intellectual acuity: ‘There was a knowing, controlling intelligence behind Pamphila's “miscellany” of knowledge, even if too little of the text survives today to be able to judge it.’Footnote ⁸

Although some scholars have suggested that her method was disordered and random, Photius's description would imply that this is too simplistic. Despite Pamphila's seemingly random organizing techniques, Photius testifies to the usefulness of her work and cites her in his histories:

The most delightful aspect of the description of her method—the element that will help us understand the possibility for beauty and pleasure in knowledge organization—is concealed in translation. Pamphila characterized her method as poikilia, suggesting that she was weaving multiple sources and genres together to create a pleasing set of histories. Photius makes it clear that this was very intentional on Pamphila's part. The original Greek term ποικιλαν (poikilia) carries an array of meanings, which the English ‘mixture and variety’ or ‘embroidery’ scarcely begin to convey. Where Photius writes ‘she thought that the mixture and variety (ποικιλαν) more agreeable and more gracious than the unity of a plan,^’ he is marking a distinction between conventional systems for organizing knowledge and Pamphila's method.

Poikilia refers to features of ancient aesthetics. Scholars have written dissertations and article-length discussions about the meaning of this term, and still, the uses and nuances of the word remain unresolved.Footnote ¹⁰ Indeed, the expansiveness and slipperiness of the term makes it a rather queer concept. In today's libraries, critical classification research has demonstrated the ways that the reduction of materials to singular subject categories not only impedes access to the varied and complex kinds of subjects and media that artists work with, but also carries hetero-patriarchal assumptions into the practices of doing librarianship, the arts, and research. Poikilia seems simultaneously queer, feminist, and ancient—beautiful, useful, intersectional, and complex.

The first stanza of Sappho's first poem begins with a variation of poikilia. Anne Carson translates it to ‘spangled.’

Poikilia does not simply mean ‘varied,’ or ‘mixed,’ or even ‘spangled.’ Its primary signification was likely associated with tapestry and weaving. Carson offers an expansive definition: ‘many-colored, spotted, dappled, variegated, intricate, embroidered, inlaid, highly wrought, complicated, changeful, diverse, abstruse, ambiguous, subtle.’Footnote ¹² In Eros the Bittersweet, Carson tells us that poikilos ‘is an adjective applicable to anything variegated, complex or shifting, for example, a “dappled” fawn, a “spangled” wing, an “intricately wrought” metal, a “complicated” labyrinth, an “abstruse” mind, a “subtle” lie, a “devious” double-entendre.’Footnote ¹³ As Adeline Grand-Clément explains, poikilia ‘is in no way a shapeless, random, or jumbled amalgamation: in the Archaic sensibility, it implies dynamics that create balance, order, beauty, and harmony.’Footnote ¹⁴ The aesthetics of poikilia privileges a ‘harmonia that does not unify’ by conveying the singularities and variations that comprise a diverse whole.Footnote ¹⁵ All elements retain their own qualities while interacting with one another and the larger universe.

In other words, poikilia privileges diversity, complexity, and togetherness.

The antithesis of poikilia seems to be uniformity and separateness.

Poikilios is also used as a descriptor for a snake's skin, a bird's feathers, or a cat's fur.

And it refers to cleverness, wittiness, and even trickery and deception. Sappho seems to be using poikilia this way, relating it to Aphrodite—one who ‘twists lures.’ Indeed, poikilia has erotic connotations. In this poem Sappho is writing to Aphrodite as one would to a lover, pleading for attention, love, and an end to suffering.

The library is a space where Eros and knowledge meet: it is a vivid terrain of and for desire. It contains the tensions inherent in encountering one's desire in reading, and it stages the setting in which those moments happen. It draws disciplinary lines based in patriarchal orientations, and so encountering our desire requires a submission to sets of rules and ordering techniques that may fuel, interrupt, or stifle one's pursuits. Might weaving or embroidering the library space – not metaphorically, not in the craft room, and not in online networks, but in and along and across the stacks, with threads of many colours, with books, and with other people – afford different erotic encounters in the library? Bringing the technique of weaving into the very public space of the library, and threading across and within the patriarchal structures that organize that space, could be a political project based in the desire of readers. It gives voice to the perspectives that are otherwise set to the margins in our library classifications, and provides a public forum to display and discuss the ways in which queer and feminist readings cut across the lines drawn by the library. It also carries a potential to form a community-based project, where we see the spaces in which readers’ practices intersect with other readers’ tastes. We might find common interests in this common space. This reparative performance may reclaim the library for readers by enacting the desires of many in the library and dramatizing intersectionality through intertextuality and reader relations. The threads enact the relationships across books and readers in a very visible and active way. They can serve as models for all of the possible and invisible threads in every library, in every person's visit and wanderings. Our intertextual encounters might be thought of as imaginary threads, or desire lines, that refuse or dismantle the disciplinary lines.

Rana Saadi Liebert has written extensively about the combination of aesthetic, erotic, and intellectual properties of poikilia, noting that ‘the visual apprehension of poikilia facilitates erotic seduction through cognitive appraisal.’ She cites Homer's depiction of Aphrodite's magic girdle as an example (Il. 14.214–15):Footnote ¹⁶

Liebert further observes the power of poikilia as a structuring agent: by ‘modifying a divinely crafted object with unique erotic properties – aphrodisiacs that are literally “built into” the garment itself – poikilia doubles as a characteristic of both craft and the forces of erotic seduction.’Footnote ¹⁷

The structures that order our libraries have histories. We might say that certain organizational principles are built into our libraries, not unlike the ways that poikilia is built into Aphrodite's garment, and the shape of a library affects access and discovery. Perhaps it is the erotic nature of the library that the disciplinary lines try to contain, so as not to be dangerous or threatening to patriarchal order. As Audre Lorde writes, ‘The erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling.’Footnote ¹⁸ Lorde insists that the erotic is a source of information that has been suppressed and devalued across western society.

The ideas presented here share a kinship with other contemporary feminist public thread-based projects, as well as library projects that incorporate art and poetry into critical practice.Footnote ¹⁹ Doing this in the library would be a particular kind of public activism that demonstrates how libraries support and are supported by patriarchy, and how library knowledge organization systems organize histories and shape our experiences with knowledge. The existing classifications can teach us about history and the epistemic structures on which power is built and sustained, and they can be aids for thinking through ideas about how to invest the library space with other kinds of power. The kind of technique I'm suggesting also brings into view the processes by which hidden infrastructures like classifications become so deeply entrenched and hard to undo, and it serves as a case to show how patriarchy and racism becomes systemic.

It is important to regard the aesthetic aspects of the lines of shelves that hold books of various genres, disciplines, and eras. The shelves bring into view and make possible certain associations and encounters, according to a design and a plan. We can redesign and imagine the spaces in which we find knowledge by foregrounding the erotics of libraries and reading. The ordered shelves might be considered the weaver's warp. And the lines that readers draw across texts are the weft. But rather than straight lines that run neatly perpendicular to the warp, readers’ lines are unruly. They intersect and are likely to get knotted up in different parts of the library, depending on any reader's desires and interests.

The library stacks can be a makerspace for ideas, a public forum for dialogue and demonstration, a canvas on which we might draw new lines, or a warp that might serve as a support structure for variously crossing threads.Footnote ²⁰