Open a page of William Blake and you run into a problem that has nothing to do with the poetry: what do you even call him? He wrote poetry, he painted paintings, and he made prints, and no single word on a library spine quite holds all three. As one recent appreciation puts it, Blake is "radical" and "unclassifiable" — a household name we still can't neatly file. That difficulty isn't a flaw in Blake. It's a clue about how literature actually grows: not by filling the shelves we already have, but by forcing us to build new ones.
This week's reading turned up a whole company of makers who don't fit their molds, and who, instead of apologizing for it, invented the forms they needed.
Some of the most interesting figures in any library are the ones the catalog struggles with. Blake is the obvious case, but he has company. Standard Ebooks recently added Arthur B. Reeve's Craig Kennedy stories, starring a "scientific detective" — half sleuth, half scientist, a character who belongs equally to the laboratory and the crime scene. Over on JSTOR Daily, the Victorian painter Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema drew on archaeology and ancient texts to build his richly detailed scenes of love and excess, working like a scholar and an artist at the same easel.