Some Notes on Bookstores

Issue 151

Prague 2011

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If you’re American and you happen to stroll into a bookstore while traveling, you might notice a suspicious lack of categories. Few things trouble some Americans more than the sudden appearance of ambiguity, so any lack of borders or regulations or categories must mean that something is truly amiss. Sure there will still be a few divides between the major sections in most bookstores—perhaps a clear spot for reference books and another for literary classics—but there will almost certainly be fewer barriers between subjects. You might notice a detective paperback on the shelf with some classic hardcovers. A few biographies supporting a pile of art books. Or a wall that appears from a distance to hold only philosophy books actually holding, after a closer inspection, a haphazard collection of essays, history, and poetry.

Patricia Highsmith once claimed that an indifference to categories helped her suspense novels sell better in Europe than in the United States—writing a thriller in France didn’t automatically relegate you to one section, with all its limitations and connotations and tropes. It was simply a book and judgements resulted from its quality rather than its subject. Of course nobody dismissed the very idea of genre, but the meaning of a genre novel was less pejorative, or restrictive, as quality writing could appear in any form.

This tendency isn’t worth exaggerating, as of course there are still distinctions—with my favorite being the giant wall of giallo novels in many Italian bookstores, letting you know in bright yellow from across the street which section is dedicated to murder. Yet there’s usually a bit more slipperiness to these distinctions. For some Americans—those who insist on coloring between the lines, those who insist on precise procedures—there’s an erratic, disorganized, scattershot look to the shelves, and this slipperiness is difficult to comprehend. How this ever-so-subtle difference began is tricky to articulate—with everything from culture, history, and the total amount of speakers in a language relevant—although you can even see this difference in the choices of some writers.