• Posted By landismom @ 6/02/2005 10:22:00 AM • • •
Thursday, June 02, 2005
bookstores and battling
I had thirty minutes to kill between meetings yesterday, and I found a new (used) bookstore. I love used bookstores, because they have cheap books, and you can almost always find something interesting. This bookstore was more interesting than most, because it had once been a mystery-only bookstore, that converted to selling other used books too.
The shelves wound through the store in no particular order. I could tell that the mystery section (which ran along the outer walls) was sorted by author's name, but could make neither rhyme nor reason of the sorting of the rest of their collection. At one point, I found How to Start and Build an Art Collection sandwiched between The Economic Role of Williamsburg and History of the Seventh Circuit, 1891-1941. I ended up finding a few things, including an amateur history of local tall tales, and when I went to the register to buy them, I asked the guy working their about their filing system. He told me that when they decided to sell other kinds of books, they decided that they would file non-fiction and fiction together, alphabetized by author, regardless of category or topic. On the whole, I liked it as a system that would make you see books that you might never see, although I wouldn't go there looking for a specific book.
But one of the things I like best about bookstores is that randomness, that you can find books that you might never have otherwise heard of. I get book recommendations from places like the Times Book Review & the now defunct Women's Review of Books, but I like to just wander in bookstores, too. One of my great frustrations about the layout of book megastores, like Borders and Barnes and Noble, is that I never have that feeling of finding something that I didn't know I was looking for.
In other news, for a brief time yesterday, I was number one on BlogExplosion's Battle of the Blogs. I tried to save a screenshot of it, but it didn't work, and now I've been pushed off the top slot, but when I first saw it, I had a complete Sally Fields moment. If you haven't checked out Battle of the Blogs yet, do--it's totally addictive. And I could use the referral credits, now that I'm gambling away my future.
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