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By Justin Werfel
Answer: MAIL

Fill in the bookcase according to each book’s top-level classification in the Dewey Decimal System. (The puzzle title implies “Do We;” “class” refers to the designation for the top-level categories in the Dewey Decimal System, and the labels on the bookcase point toward ten categories designated by three digits, of which only the first is relevant; the text and bookcase suggest using the books to fill in the grid.) Classify each book (either by using the Dewey Decimal System directly, which doesn’t require identifying the books precisely in all cases, or by just looking the classification up online if you insist); for each pair, fill in the grid cell whose row corresponds to the first book’s class and whose column corresponds to the second’s.

(“Letters” in the flavortext confirms both the letters spelled out by the bookcase and the answer itself.)

The books are as follows:

Left column:

  • 300: Bowling Alone (Robert D. Putnam)
  • 500: A Brief History of Time (Stephen Hawking)
  • 900: Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (Dee Brown)
  • 200: The Confessions of St. Augustine
  • 800: The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas)
  • 100: Critique of Pure Reason (Immanual Kant)
  • 200: Dictionary of Hindu Lore and Legend
  • 400: Eats Shoots and Leaves (Lynne Truss)
  • 000: Foundations of Library and Information Science (Richard E. Rubin)
  • 300: Freakonomics (Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner)
  • 600: Gray’s Anatomy
  • 100: The Interpretation of Dreams (Sigmund Freud)
  • 600: Introductory Mining Engineering
  • 200: The Jew in the Lotus (Rodger Kamenetz)
  • 700: Juggling for the Complete Klutz (John Cassidy and B. C. Rimbeaux)
  • 100: The Last Days of Socrates (Plato)
  • 900: Long Walk to Freedom (Nelson Mandela)
  • 100: Meditations on First Philosophy (Rene Descartes)
  • 400: Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary
  • 300: Miss Manners’ Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior (Judith Martin)
  • 800: Moby-Dick (Herman Melville)
  • 700: The Negative (Ansel Adams)
  • 000: Our Dumb Century (The Onion)
  • 100: Psychology of the Unconscious (C. G. Jung)
  • 300: The Rule of Law (Tom Bingham)
  • 200: The Search for God at Harvard (Ari L. Goldman)
  • 900: The Travels of Marco Polo
  • 300: Why Johnny Can’t Read (Rudolf Flesch)
  • 200: World Religions (John Bowker)

Right column:

  • 800: Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
  • 300: Collapse (Jared Diamond)
  • 700: Escher on Escher: Exploring the Infinite
  • 400: The Language Instinct (Steven Pinker)
  • 700: On Architecture (Frank Lloyd Wright)
  • 000: Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia
  • 200: Sikhs and Sikhism (W. H. McLeod)
  • 600: The Way Things Work (David Macaulay)
  • 400: Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue (John McWhorter)
  • 000: Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig)
  • 300: The Communist Manifesto (Karl Marx and Frederick Engels)
  • 100: Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Friedrich Nietzsche)
  • 700: Seaforms (Dale Chihuly)
  • 600: Anthology for the New Millennium (Buckminster Fuller)
  • 700: Dali
  • 400: Syntactic Structures (Noam Chomsky)
  • 800: The Complete Works of William Shakespeare
  • 300: The Omnivore’s Dilemma (Michael Pollan)
  • 800: This Side of Paradise (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
  • 400: 501 Spanish Verbs
  • 300: The Tipping Point (Malcolm Gladwell)
  • 300: Blackberry Winter (Margaret Mead)
  • 000: The Book of Lost Books (Stuart Kelly)
  • 700: Learning to Weave (Deborah Chandler)
  • 600: How to Create a Mind (Ray Kurzweil)
  • 800: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (Mark Twain)
  • 900: Quick Reference World Atlas (Rand McNally)
  • 700: The World of the Dark Crystal (Brian Froud)
  • 000: The C Programming Language (Kernighan and Ritchie)