Sigh

[tree_and_leaf]

I was in Borders this afternoon, looking for a chocolate croissant, and noticed that Sarah Paretsky was coming to speak about her new novel tonight. Too late for me, alas.

On the other hand, I did get a very good book about the history of doctrine. But Border's 'Religion' section drives me up the wall. They jumble together Bibles and liturgy, academic theology, popular theology, devotional books (mostly American), utter rubbish of the Holy Blood and the Holy Grail type, some books on magic that I suspect were misfiled, and ghastly novels like the Left Behind series, which certainly shouldn't be in the non-fiction section. You can't find anything. Blackwells is much better: a far bigger selection and categorised by someone who knows something about the subject (and no Baigent and Leigh or LeHay, or whatever the guy is called, which is a good thing). On the other hand, they do sometimes have good books, particularly from American publishers, which Blackwells sometimes don't - such as Pelikan's history of Christian Doctrine.

/rant...

Comments

[mrs-wolf.livejournal.com]

As a bookseller (I've worked in the big stores and the little hole in the wall stores. I hated the big stores for their corporateness and I loved the hole in the wall stores but never seemed to actually get paid.) I can safely say that Waterstones is my favorite UK "new" bookstore. The thing I never understood about the UK, though, was the new bookstores. I'm an old book girl. I was in absolute heaven rifling through the old bookstores in London, I spent many a paycheck in a little hole-in-the-wall bookstore just beside the big London library. Their WWII selection was absolutely amazing.

Shelving is a bitch. I'm a perfectionist, and especially at the smaller stores where I was the one who knew the most about book prices, I'd always be checking to make sure they were correctly priced, and pulling rare books to sell for a higher price on the internet. It took so long, just to get through one row.