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Hunkered Down in a Comfort Zone

I was hunkered down in Barnes and Noble. Had the heads-up that it was going to precipitate. But I just wasn't getting a comfort level with the books that I'd chosen for my personal time, I figured that I'd stay put. I realized that I was looking out the rear-vision mirror instead of the windscreen, but who would be my go-to for the goods on what to buy? I knew that as soon as the tire hit the tar I'd regret spending on books that maybe wouldn't read but the flip-side was having none. Then again it was my dime.

Nope - I just can't get the hang of this American English. My skill-set is below the radar. Let me start over.

I was browsing the shelves of books at Barnes and Noble, looking for some holiday reading. I knew that I'd probaly buy books that I wouldn't read but I had no one around to ask advice. Still, when push comes to shove, it was my money to waste.

I love going to Barnes and Noble. Ever since the following exchange with a shop assistant there, I just knew it was my kind of place.

Me: Do you have any books by Simone De Beauvoir?
Sales Person: Who is she?
Me (being a smarty pants): Simone De Beauvoir. French Existentialist. Writer. Social Essayist. Born 1908 Died 1986.
Sales Person: Oh but she's dead then. So how can she write a book?

You may wonder why I didn't just look on the shelves. Well, I had already done that, but it was not under the D's or the B's and in any case I was not sure under which category her books would be catalogued.

Perhaps I had developed a mind-set from an experience in the Northcote Municipal library in Australia in the eighties. The suburb of Northcote was a Labor Party stronghold at a time when the Victorian premier was a Labor Party pollie who preached "equality of out-come" and "esteem-based" education. Firmly behind her, the managing committee of the library had embraced the idea of employing only the alphabetically-challenged in order to show that the library did not discriminate, and if it did, well it was damned well going to be on the side of the uneducated.

Instead of putting all fiction together and in alphabetical order, the Northcote library organised all literature was into sections on the shelves that had absolutely no correlation with the library's card indexes. Yes there were still card indexes as computers I can only assume, were considered to be the tools of the elite. "Boo to computers!" I could imagine the library committee members saying over their café lattés.

If you looked up Loves Labour Lost, in the catalogue, you'd see that it was there, somewhere ... But where? It most likely would be shelved in the "Politics Section". I know for a fact that the "Merchant of Venice" was it the Travel Section, and "Death of a Salesman" was filed under "Murder Mysteries". There was just no way of telling. And no way of checking - at least if you didn't have heaps of leisure time - because within the "sections" books were arranged in what appeared to be completely random order.

I remember once, going over to the desk to ask, "WHY???" This was pretty difficult to do, because of the noise. You see, the Northcote library committee had decided that quiet libraries were unfair on the working class. Maybe they assumed that working class people like to be noisy. Whatever.

So the library was a noisy place as kids skateboarded on the ramps between sections and the local teenage gangs threatened each other with clever repartee. But I exaggerate...

Nearly two decades and 12,000 miles later. Barnes and Noble and a new meaning to contemporary literature.

Times have changed since my De Beauvoir visit. There are no longer any salespeople to annoy with one's queries. The staff consists of greeters, security people and cashiers. There are computer terminals but no one to operate them. If you want to look up a book, you are out of luck. But you CAN buy cinnamon decaff coffee and blueberry muffins, tumblers, bookmarks, greeting cards, reading lamps and thermos flasks.

It still feels like a bookshop. You can still browse and flip through real paper pages. But the atmosphere of a bookshop has been replaced with one of a mega supermarket.

Bookshop to supermarket; library to playground. Which is worse? Neither gives me a comfort level, and that's a no-brainer. Period!

I must be getting old. O no! I'm looking through the rear-vision mirror instead of the windscreen. It's like I must be acclimating momentarily.

Kate Juliff
New York
December 2004