Take This Book and Shelve It: Confronting the Category Ghetto

It's a dilemma that every bookseller faces: Where do you shelve a book so that the right reader finds it?

Sounds like a simple question, but as many booksellers will tell you, it's not. Does that biography with lots of travel stories go in biography or travel ... or is there space to put a copy in each section? What about books by or about Hillary Clinton and Rudolph Giuliani -- are they placed in politics, history, or biography ... or somewhere else? Or that great, lost literary mystery that has cross-appeal? Importantly, where do you think your customers will expect to find the book?

When you add it all up, booksellers are faced with an amazing number of possible shelving permutations each day and divvying it all up in a finite space -- sometimes very finite -- is a challenge worthy of any statistician.

The key, booksellers noted, is to know your inventory and your customers -- and to think outside the box.

Keri Holmes, owner of The Kaleidoscope bookstore in Hampton, Iowa, feels very strongly about Zoran Zivkovic's Steps Through the Mist (Aio Publishing), a book that is BISAC-coded as a fantasy. The problem is, she said, the book is perfect for readers who prefer literary fiction, many of whom would never deign to darken the shelves of her store's fantasy section.

Holmes loves Zivkovic's book so much that she decided to write the book's publisher, Aio Publishing, to first, compliment the small publisher on the book's content and design and second, to discuss her fears that this tremendous title could easily get lost in the so-called "fantasy ghetto" of bookstores across the country.

Noting that "fantasy novel" often "connotes trivial plots, pure entertainment, buxom women, dueling muscular heroes, and adolescent readers," Holmes prefers to categorize Zivkovic's work as speculative fiction. "This is literary fiction," she told the publisher. "I want ... to help my customers see what the 'fantasy' fog may be obscuring, in this case a luminescent literary gem. I will be handselling Steps Through the Mist."

In a recent interview, Holmes discussed the ghettoization dilemma that all booksellers face. "There's two problems," she said. "Shelving and the problem of how do I talk to a reader who likes good, meaty writing that has fantasy elements.... I have a shelf of speculative fiction and literature and a lot of things I just double shelve. I don't file books alpha by author, I lump them together by interest." Holmes' concern isn't over established books, such as The Lord of the Rings series, but about new work that can get lost, especially in larger stores, staffed by "clerks as opposed to booklovers."

At Talking Leaves Books in Buffalo, New York, Jonathan Welch explained that the store's "basic philosophy is to shelve books in places where people will be most likely to find them." For instance, a memoir that deals heavily with food or cooking might be placed in the cooking section as well as the memoir section. Because there always are space constraints, Talking Leaves has been arranged to "put sections in a vicinity with another that makes sense," he said. "Memoir and biography; food, health, and gardening."

At Maria's Bookshop in Durango, Colorado, Joe Foster said, "I read across all genres.... so I am very active with handselling." Foster writes book reviews for an independent magazine, so that helps him find good reads, too.

But handselling is not the cure-all for rescuing great books from the remainder pile. "A lot of times I pay attention to the BISAC code," Foster explained, "but I also think about the target audience for a particular book." He pointed out that Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow (Ballantine), for example, is a very literary book so it's shelved in the fiction section as opposed Science Fiction.

Similarly, Kaleidoscope's Holmes shelved The Book of Air & Shadows by Michael Gruber (Morrow) -- a thriller about the murder of a Shakespearian scholar -- alongside books by and about Shakespeare, figuring readers interested in the Bard might be enjoy the book.

At R.J. Julia's, in the town of Madison, Connecticut, Karen Corvello stressed, "We don't let anyone tell us how to code things. We shelve books where customers think they're going to look for them first." R.J. Julia also has a Staff Suggestions section that includes titles from the entire store. "The Staff Suggestions section is right inside at the front of the store," Corvello said. "That's one way to address the issue."

Another way to cross-promote books across genres is through seasonal displays. "I rearrange for seasonal reasons," said Holmes. "My store is so small I think about books in terms of merchandising. I don't get as locked into those categories." It's all about "pulling stuff from its normal home and finding a way to display it and link it [to a reader] in a way that" is unexpected, she explained.

For example, the store has an Iowa-oriented display table, which includes tour books of Iowa and Iowa-related books. As part of the display, the store included a non-Iowa-oriented field guide to cemeteries, Stories in Stone by Douglas Keister (Gibbs Smith). Holmes simply figured that anyone interested in touring Iowa might be interested in a field guide to cemeteries, and she was right. "We sold dozens," she said. "It's about finding the common thread. Sometimes you can give legs to older books."

Sometimes the solution is actually to create an entire new section, as was the case at Talking Leaves in Buffalo. Welch reported that, after Toni Morrison grew in stature, the store received requests from customers for books by other African-American authors. Ultimately, the solution was to create an entire section devoted to African-American literature. The store also created similar sections for Native American writing and GLBT fiction, he said.

"It is a service to readers to do this," Welch said, adding that it's important to understand that there are "lots of customers who don't like to ask" where a particular book is. Over time, however, "you get to know your customers and that is the great thing about being an independent and in a neighborhood. Some ideas about shelving came from our customers." --David Grogan