From: Ian Singer <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Mon, 15 Jan 2018 09:42:32 -0500

Well, I hope you haven’t been to a B&N for so long because you realize you
can get most of not all you need from your local public library.  And so
how does that environment compare to how your local public library
displays, Jim

Ian Singer - former publisher of Library Journal who remains passionate for
maintaining our publics!


On Jan 14, 2018, at 7:15 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