Found this project I thought might be interesting to look at. It touches on some of the same things you are thinking about.
Also found this project by Nina Katchadourian (we talked about her map projects):
……culling through a collection of books, pulling particular titles, and eventually grouping the books into clusters so that the titles can be read in sequence, from top to bottom. The final results are shown either as photographs of the book clusters or as the actual stacks themselves, shown on the shelves of the library they were drawn from.
