HOW TO ORGANIZE A BOOK STORE
Listen to Jim:
or read on…
Want to know the right way to organize a book store?
So do I.
Only, I know that, so far, I’ve learned from experience and from other armchair experts, a hundred ways not to organize a book store.
1. You can arrange all the books by color. This would please the customer who insists that she wants oversized old children’s nursery books, but only if they fit in with the color scheme of her expectant daughter’s baby-to-be room. I do my best to help, and she seems pleased with the results.
2. You can arrange all the books by size. Years ago, the Salvation Army Thrift Store book section manager did just that. The books were shelved by size. It took me years to realize that he was an adult illiterate—that he, by his own admission, could not read a word. This obviously qualified him for the job. I encouraged him to take an adult reading course, but have no way of knowing whether he took the advice.
3. You can arrange the value of the books by weight. Many’s the time I’ve taken a stack of books to a flea market dealer to be priced and bagged. He carefully holds each volume in his hand, testing its heft and size, before giving me a price. Heavier books are more expensive than light ones.
4. You can arrange them alphabetically, but this often backfires. For instance, if you are a customer looking for all books about Marilyn Monroe, it would take you a long time to find them in the show biz bio section, because they would be spread throughout the alphabet. Or you can arrange the books by the name of the subject of the bio—mainly, placing all Marilyn Monroe titles together, regardless of author or heft or color or size. This backfires when someone asks for all books by Norman Mailer, for instance. You’d have to go to many different sections of the store to find them all—since he wrote books about all kinds of subjects, including Marilyn Monroe.
5. You can arrange books by series name—for instance, placing all Pollyanna books together, but in this and many other cases, the Pollyanna books were written by more than one author…if you were looking for all books by one Pollyanna author, you’d again have to scurry about the store a long time to find them.
6. You could arrange books by geographic location, but this can get complicated, too…
Anyhow, you catch the drift.
Next time you’re looking for a specific book at Reed Books and notice me running about, looking in different sections, you may be more tolerant. An example: “I’m looking for Ray Bradbury books.” Well, Bradbury writes in practically every genre, so where do you look? His enormous lifetime output is only ten percent science fiction/fantasy. He also writes grand opera, poetry, plays, architectural columns, mysteries, autobiography & biography, children’s books and science commentaries, to name a few. I know where they are in the store, but it may take me some time to make a stack for you to peruse.
Go ahead—make a better book store, one that’s perfectly arranged so that you can find anything instantly. If you can also invent a backpack or purse in which you can locate exactly what you want at the push of a button, you could make a bunch of money. But that’s in the science fiction genre, isn’t it? Where would you file the instructions?
Let me know
(c) Jim Reed 2010 A.D.