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