Kieran Healy’s Weblog Sociology and other distractions

Classification Problems

A post by Henry Farrell reminds me of a question: When at your local Borders Bookstore, is it worse to be a philosopher and find the Metaphysics section stocked mostly with books by David Icke, or a sociologist and find the Sociology section stocked with books by Ann Coulter? There’s not much to choose. My view is that it’s the latter because Icke is insane but not actually evil. He can also be very funny. Liberals may be terrible, but they can’t touch twelve-foot tall shape-shifting alien lizards who run the world. And to think this man once played in goal for Coventry City.

I imagine people from other fields have similar experiences in bookshops. Sean Hannity dominates the Political Science section. OJ Simpson (soon Laci Peterson) trial books and do-it-yourself divorce kits shove aside Blackstone’s Commentaries on the half-shelf of law books. Jack Welch and Jesus CEO trample all over those slim MIT Press volumes by clever young economists.

Come to think of it, Economics is often the most poorly-served of the social sciences on the shelves of the big stores in terms of volume of titles for sale, which is odd. The Business and Investing section drowns it out, I suppose. Political Science seems to do best.

If my University bookstore was any good I wouldn’t have to hit the big stores, but its recent expansion into a space three times larger than the old one seems to have been designed to give the sports merchandise more room to breathe.

You can complain—but at least sociology, philosophy, religion, law sections at Borders or B&N also contain at least a minority of serious, worthwhile books. Try being into woodworking—go to the big box store and look in their crafts (or “home improvement”) section. You will learn what it means to be dismayed. And the problem is not that good books in the subject don’t exist—they do, in abundance—just not carried by big box bookstores.

Come to DC. Or browse online at http://www.reiters.com/ You don’t the volume discounts of a Borders or an Amazon – but damn it if they don’t have the inventory.

http://www.semcoop.com

That link should allow you to shop for the lastest John Grisham masterwork in peace.

Don’t forget the in-house Clinique counter. I don’t know how I got along before I could buy exfoliating cream in the bookstore.

You’re right about economics. A few years ago I wanted to find a decent popular explanation of Keynesian economics, but literally couldn’t find a single thing except for a comic book.

I finally found a few, though. In London.

Cutting Costs

If my University bookstore was any good I wouldn’t have to hit the big stores, but its recent expansion into

History: Good books sandwiched between coffee table books on WWII fighting machines, boring presidential bios and accounts of colonial patriotism.

Western History: More barbed wire, rough riders and prairie pioneer diaries than you can shake a stick at. A few Indians thrown in for color.

Environmental History: Wha? How ‘bout some nature books instead?

we go to Labyrinth and are unacquainted with such problems.

It always depresses me somewhat when the new age bollocks section in bookshops is always at least two times the size of the natural science section.

“Don’t forget the in-house Clinique counter.”

Are you serious?! Wow.

The history section at most major chains should be renamed the American Civil War section (with a subsection perhaps titled The Time-Life Series of Twentieth-Century Atrocities).

I actually used to work at Borders about ten years ago. They were expanding then and trying to compete with B&N. People had heard of B&N but, unlike now, when I said I worked at Borders, people looked at me quzzically or say that they loved the places burritos.

We used to have a great philosphy, literary criticism sections. It made those of us who were uncomfortable working for a chain at least take some pride that we actually kept these areas well stocked with stuff you couldn’t find at some of the really good indie bookstores in town. Today when I go into one and it’s pathetic. They are worse than B&n and I avoid the place like a leper colony.

Many Barnes and Noble stores haven’t changed their academic inventory for years. This comes in handy when you hear a title has slipped out of print and return to the store to find it in the same place it was ten years ago.

It’s even more dispiriting for poets. I haven’t been to a chain bookstore in years, but I remember the section called Poetry & Inspirational. Come to think of it, the last time I was in a chain bookstore (in Syracuse, NY) I was giving a poetry reading. Just as I was getting organized at the podium, a guy came up to me with copies of my books & asked me to sign them all—just the signature, no dedication. “Sorry I can’t stay,” he said, “there’s another writer I need to get signatures from.” He was a book speculator. At least he bought the books, which is more than I can say for the poetry club crowd in the audience, who, during the Q&A, stood up & read their poems instead of commenting on mine. What a world. You might also be interested in hearing about the poetry reading I gave at the Westminster Dog Show, but that is a tale for another time.

Economics is not the worst, business is. Try finding ONE serious academic management or business book among the “All I need to know about finance I learned at a hot dog stand” or “the immutable laws of [marketing | finance | strategy | globalization].”

My university bookstore dedicates about four times more space to the school paraphrenalia than to books. (Class textbooks are kept separately, in a Costco-like environment.) I guess that is isomorphic to the general importance of sports and school spirit versus learning and academics…

It’s not even that much fun being a David Icke fan and having to scour through all the wimpy-drippy “Celtic Love Magick of the Celestines From Atlantis” in order to find a copy of “Black Helicopters and Cattle Mutilations”. They really ought to reorganise the “New Age” section on the basis of utopian versus dystopian.

‘Tin-foil hat’ vs. ‘flowers in your hair’?

“Political Science seems to do best”? In what universe?

Now, granted, Chomsky will fill up half the shelf space, and he might (nominally) be a political scientist, if by “political scientist” you mean “completely addled prescriptivist social philosopher.” And it’s hard to find anything vaguely scholarly in most of the social science sections. But you’d be lucky to find even “pop” political science like Mueller, Dahl, or Huntington, much less serious empirical work (the best I’ve ever done at B&N is a copy of Lijphart’s “Democracies”).

The only mass-market bookstore I’ve ever found that has a decent selection in political science is the original Borders in Ann Arbor, and that’s only because it’s down the street from the U of M Institute for Social Research and the Center for Political Studies and downstairs from ICPSR, and hence probably not a real mass-market store by any reasonable standard.

Support your local bookstore (not)

Kieran Healy laments the quantity (and quality) of scholarly works at popular and collegiate bookstores. I completely sympathize; our on-campus bookstore (outside of the textbook…

The quality of the “Law” section varies widely from Borders to Borders. I’ve generally found, though, that the “Philosophy” sections are well-stocked, and that’s based on browsing at Borders in 4 different states. For example I wanted to buy David Lewis’ On the Plurality of Worlds and I was happily surprised to see that my local Borders (Chicago) had it in stock. In general Borders has a far better (and far better-maintained) academic selection than Barnes & Noble.

Chris

I Don’t Licke Icke (all that much anymore)

Structured procrastination, oh yeh. I have an unfinished review of Doug Henwood’s “After the New Economy” on the computer in front of me, which is looking like taking me longer to write than he took to write the book, plus…