There’s this book store in Corvallis called The Book Bin. It’s pretty cool (not as cool as Browsers’ Bookstore right around the corner), but they do one thing that rubs me the wrong way. After I browsed through the science fiction section, I walked by the mystery section and saw a big sign for General Fiction. Oh, good, there are a couple of non-genre books I’ve been looking for. Browsing, browsing…that’s odd. Fern Michaels, Nora Roberts, Danielle Steel – this is the romance section, not general fiction. Why wouldn’t they just label it romance? Are they hiding the fact that they have a romance section? I think I’m offended by that. Why hide romance? So then I went looking for the actual general fiction section and oh, no. No, they’ve named it Literature. That’s right – we have to disguise the romance section because heaven forbid anyone thinks this bookstore carries those kind of books, and to differentiate real books, we’re going to call them LIT-er-a-ture. Snobs.
Even the five-foot-tall TARDIS they created out of books can’t win me over now.
