Book classification

Abstract

This article was originally entitled Book Classification and it was published in the second half of the 19^th century in an American journal called The Journal of Speculative Philosophy (v. 4, no. 2, 1870, pages 114-129). Its author is a reformist philosopher and educator, William Torrey Harris (1835-1909), also from the U.S. By making public a system of book classification developed by Harris himself for the public school libraries of the city of Saint Louis, Missouri, the article had a major influence in the history of the construction of bibliographic classifications in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. As Harris proposed a book arrangement inspired by Francis Bacon’s narrative (mental faculties = memory, imagination and reason), but conducted theoretically by the Hegelian perspective of setting reason -- and, thus, Philosophy and Science -- as the primary  elements, Harris’s classification received wide visibility in North America and was the foundation for Dewey’s Decimal Classification, which, in its turn, would become one of the most influential bibliographic classifications in the Western world. The theoretical and historic importance of Harris’s classification motivated the translation of this article, originally written in American English, to Brazilian Portuguese. We would like to stress that the translators sought to respect and maintain the author’s style, which followed that of the 19^th century.