July 2, 2014 Article

The Old Coot is book smart.

By Merlin Lessler

My neck is sore. Tilting to the right, too. It happens when you’ve been in the library, a bookstore or staring at used paperbacks and hard covers at a yard sale. Book publishers refuse to line up the letters on the spine in a vertical, top down alignment or in smaller horizontal letters. Instead, they make us crane our necks and lean to the right to read the book title and author’s name.

It’s not so bad for the top few rows on the book rack, but by the time you get to the bottom row you have to squat, then get down on your knees and finally, lay down on the floor and do a military crawl from one end of the rack to the other. When you walk in the door at home, listing to the right, your neck bent in the same direction, dust on your knees and the rest of your clothes soiled and rumpled, you get the look! The one that says, “Where have you been?” I always lie. I say I got in a tussle down at the senior center. I’ll never admit I got this way from a literary endeavor.

What is it about book publishers? Literate, educated to the point of being highbrow, with all the knowledge of the world passing over their desks, yet they haven’t figured out how to print titles on books so you can read them when they’re stacked on a bookshelf? It’s bad enough in a bookstore or a library; at least they line up the books in the same direction. But, when you rifle through stacks at a yard sale, where the books are usually scattered about in helter skelter fashion, you have to lean right, lean left, right again, left again. Ouch! 

And, what about the poor authors whose books end up on the bottom row. A modern day Shakespeare would go undiscovered. Readers just don’t have the physical fortitude to squat low and risk tipping over on the off chance a book title or an author’s name might catch their eye. The bottom shelves should be used to store stuff, not books. Cereal boxes for example. Food processors know the value of having the name of their products readable when stacked sideways on a shelf. It might improve the circulation at the library and sales figures at the bookstores if the publishers got their nose out of a manuscript, took a walk down the cereal aisle in a grocery store and looked at the top, bottom, sides, front and back of easily read cereal boxes!

The only good thing about this messed up book title thing, is that you can tell who in town is well read. It’s the people who list to the right, have a neck that’s off kilter and dusty knees on their pants.