If you’ve ever written a book, you’ve probably done the Book Turning Shuffle. For the non-authors in the crowd, that’s where you go into a bookstore that has your book. You notice that the copies of your book are shelved spine-out, whereas copies of other people’s books are shelved so that the cover of their book shows. If it’s a competitive book, it’s just maddening, and if it’s not a competing book, it’s just plain wrong. So you rejigger the books on the shelf so that your books are cover-out, with the hopes that customers will buy your book.
I was in Costco yesterday. They do things a bit differently; they pile books on tables, so that multiple stacks of a book are visible, and you can see several covers of the same book. I was looking over the books, when my eyes were brutally assaulted by at least eight or nine covers featuring psychotic attack harpy Ann Coulter and her latest stinking chunk of offal. That was unacceptable; there were children in the store, for goodness’ sake. I took action; all of the books were face-down within seconds. Dori came up and gave me a look; I said, “It’s a political statement.” Without a word, she took other people’s books and began stacking them on top of the books I’d just flipped. I see that we’re in good company.
Heh, that’s pretty funny. Reminds me of my own experiences in commercial bookshelf rearrangement. Years ago, back when spam was more of a problem on Usenet than in e-mail, a couple of lawyers who had been spamming the newsgroups with solicitations for their services in obtaining Green Cards wrote a book about how to get rich on the Internet. Every time I saw that book in the computer section of a store, I got irritated. So I started rearranging the shelves, turning the spines toward the back, placing the book in back of other books that were facing cover out, that sort of thing. Whatever I could do to prevent some poor, misguided soul from seeing the book and being tempted to buy it.
I got my karmic payback after a few months when I walked into my parents’ house and saw my own father with a copy of that book. We had a nice, long talk about how if he ever, EVER did anything that was recommended in that book, I was going to come over to their house with a sledgehammer and introduce it to their computer.