Book and library

Le plan de classement is the classification scheme, and « plan » is the wrong first guess almost every time an English reader meets the word. The sense the two languages share is the smallest part of it. In French a plan is first of all a flat drawing of something seen from above: le plan de la ville is a street map, le plan de l’appartement is a floor plan, and le plan du métro is the diagram on the wall. Out of the flat surface come uses English would never reach for with « plan ». Le plan de travail in a kitchen is the worktop. Le premier plan and l’arrière-plan are the foreground and the background of a picture, and from painting the word went into cinema, where un plan is a shot, the stretch of film between two cuts, so that un gros plan is a close-up. One fixed phrase has left all of that behind: laisser quelqu’un en plan is to walk off and leave somebody stranded. Only then does the word mean a plan — and here it is neither drawing nor intention but an arrangement, the order a library imposes on knowledge.