
So you all know I've been helping sort books for the Friends of the Library book sale which starts Thursday, in case any of you are in the Charlotte area.
As a former bookseller, and in fact a former shipping & receiving coordinator, I used to sort all the books coming into a B&N superstore for a year, and I also shelved for the year before that. I am very good at sorting books. Not everyone has my knowledge though of books (in fact, that's one of my best assets as I really know many thousands of books off the top of my head.) I wasn't at all surprised to find Eat, Pray, Love and Marley and Me in fiction instead of memoirs, but some of the missorted books really made me laugh, although I could see how they made perfect sense to someone unfamiliar with the book. A few of my favorites:

Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl found in Science.
(it's a novel)
Bad Land: An American Romance by Jonathan Raban found in Romance.
(it's a history of the American West)
The Memoirs of Cleopatra by Margaret George found in History.
(it's a novel)

Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl found in Science.
(it's a novel)
Bad Land: An American Romance by Jonathan Raban found in Romance.
(it's a history of the American West)
The Memoirs of Cleopatra by Margaret George found in History.
(it's a novel)
I'm sure there are other books like these that have titles that encourage misshelving. Can you think of others I should be on the lookout for before the sale starts? Have you seen books similarly humorously misshelved? For instance, I wouldn't be at all surprised to find The Solitude of Prime Numbers by Paolo Giordano in math/science (it's a novel.)
By the way, I walked over 10,000 steps sorting books for 6 hours. And I wasn't even the primary runner! For the last 3 hours I worked with a friend and mostly I sorted and she took the books to their sections. Excellent workout!

By the way, I walked over 10,000 steps sorting books for 6 hours. And I wasn't even the primary runner! For the last 3 hours I worked with a friend and mostly I sorted and she took the books to their sections. Excellent workout!
1 comment:
Those are great - especially Pessl's book. I feel like I've seen odd placements of books in library sales, but can't recall them now. I wonder if Sedaris' Squirrel Meets Chipmunk would be accidentally placed in children's book, even though it is absolutely not meant for children.
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