There's glory for you!

[readsalot]

I went into the Lexington Center Walden Books this evening, to see if I could find a copy of Howl's Moving Castle to reread, now that I've seen the movie (about which more later). I went to the YA section, and was very confused, because the books seemed to be in no order that was humanly comprehensible. And, really, I can usually find order: I was always very good at those tests where they give you a set of numbers and ask what's the next one. But there seemed to be no order here. I could see books by some authors in large clumps, but why were the ones by Brian Jacques far after the ones by Terry Pratchett?

So, I went up to the cashier, and waited patiently while other people bought their books, and finally said that I'd been to the YA section, and the books seemed to be in no particular order. The woman at the register explained that they were in order, by author and series title. I said, "Oh, ok," and went back to look, but still, the order was not. I went back and said, "No, really, there is no order," and she explained, patiently, that it was by author and series title. Now, part of the problem here is that I use the logical "and" by default, so to me she was saying that series title replaced book title within the list of an author's books, and that's not what she meant. Eventually I understood. What they mean by "order" is that, well, let's say we have books in no particular series by Diana Wynne Jones, and Discworld books by Terry Pratchett, and Redwall books by Brian Jacques. The order you'd see on the shelf would be Pratchett, then Jones, then Jacques. Because, you see, the real ordering would be Discworld, Jones, Redwall.

This makes no sense. What do you do if an author has written three phenomenally successful series? (I think they'd be ordering by author, on the grounds that only then will people remember the author's name, but I'm not sure). Why have they done this? It seems that its only purpose is to force people to ask for more help when finding books, and that's only going to lead to frustration and lost sales when people have to wait behind the other people trying to pay, and the people wanting to pay then have to wait while someone is led to the appropriate book, and...aaaarrrrgghh.

Oh, and Howl's Moving Castle has apparently not been reissued lately. It was in their computer system as book 1 of a series, which for some reason made the store worker I'd been talking to feel semi-triumphant over me (maybe it demonstrated that all YA books really are part of a series?), with a graphic novel coming out soon (presumably something based on the movie.)

Comments

[readsalot.livejournal.com]

I'm sure that they (or at least someone at a managerial level there) think that this will make things easier. I also kind of wish I could be in there to see what happens when people try to make use of their wondrous new system. I think that the real solution would be to try to convince kids that it's useful to remember the names of their favorite authors.