From: "SANFORD G THATCHER" <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Sun, 14 Jan 2018 21:48:29 -0500

Was it published at a trade discount by Yale? If not, that's why you didn't
find it.

Also, chains like B&N usually follow a policy of having a book on the
shelves
for 90 days, and if a copy isn't sold in that period, it goes back to the
publishers as a return for credit.

You're much more likely to find it in stock at an independent bookstore like
University Press Books in Berkeley.

Sandy Thatcher

On Sun, Jan 14, 2018 07:15 PM LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>From: "Jim O'Donnell" <[log in to unmask]>
>Date: Sun, 14 Jan 2018 16:45:14 -0700
>
>I'm a book person, but I realized today that I haven't been in a Barnes and
>Noble in . . . six months?  a year?  So I stopped at the one in Tempe AZ,
>bustling on Sunday afternoon.
>
>Of course I noticed that most of the store was taken up by merchandising
>and merchandise.  It's a good thing that a quarter of the store is designed
>to get children reading, and not bad that there's a large DVD section.
>Lots of tables beckon me with deals and remainders and "must reads" (I
>could make no sense out of that table at all).  I settled down to look for
>new releases and to check a few favorite sections.
>
>Sections first:  I counted shelves for "History", "Fiction and Literature",
>and then separately shelves for the other genres of fiction (Mystery,
>Romance, Manga, Graphic, Teen, Sci-FI, etc.).  History was a bit masculine
>and presentist for my taste (1/3 US, 1/3 "War", 1/3 "World", heavily
>emphasizing politics, empires, statesmen), but for every one book on the
>history shelves, there were five on the rather less distressing "Fiction
>and Literature" shelves.  (Jane Austen had a whole shelf, there were half a
>dozen well-chosen Nabokov titles, but no Proust.)  But the surprise was
>that the *other* fiction shelves comprised twice as many volumes as the
>supposedly main section.  So for every history book, there were five
>"Fiction and Literature", and ten more fiction of genre fiction.
>
>And new releases?  I know I'm idiosyncratic and old and crotchety, but
>nothing, and I mean nothing, appealed to me or spoke of itself as an
>interesting new book that a body should at least know *about*.  Familiar
>brands, superficial topics, scandal, sensation, and the like.  So I made a
>point of asking about one title, a new book by an old friend, Patrick
>Deneen, *Why Liberalism Failed*, just out from Yale Press, 200 pages, a
>very provocative and interesting argument about the way our 'conservatives'
>and 'liberals' all represent a modern liberal strain of political thought
>that has led us to inequality, populism, and worse.  Not everybody's cup of
>tea, but a remarkable success for being taken up in the last couple of days
>separately by both David Brooks and Ross Douthat on the op-ed pages of the
>NY Times, so much so that the hardcover is out of stock on Amazon and
>listed as #214 best-selling overall there.  Not only was it not in stock at
>B&N (in a state of the union where one might expect at least a few readers
>to find the title immediately agreeable), but it had never been in stock in
>print and at this moment isn't expected to be.  They could get an
e-version.
>
>I draw no conclusions:  just reporting.
>
>Jim O'Donnell
>Arizona State University