The Old Coot is book smart?
By Merlin Lessler
I wandered into a “Hudson Books”
store at the airport in Sandford, Florida the other day. I didn’t know Hudson
was still in business. So many bookstores have gone out of business over the
past few decades; it’s a pleasure to find one still in business like Riverow
Books in Owego. Anyhow, there I was with an hour to kill, walking around and
checking things out: candy bars for $3.50, gum for $2.00. Airport prices are
high on everything; food, booze, you name it, they clean out your wallet. Nothing like a captive audience and merchants
with monopoly power. But we pay it. Have no choice.
The book store drew me in. I
could kill some time; see what book I might want to add to my reading list and
get it from the bookstore or the library when I got back home. The display of books
in the airport was the best I’d ever seen. Perfect for an old coot. The books weren’t
on the shelves edgewise; they were facing front. You didn’t have to strain to
read the title like you do when tilting your head to the right in libraries and
bookstores. It’s even worse at a yard sale where some are right-side up and
others aren’t
All this straining, because
the publishers refuse to line up the letters on the spine of the book in a
vertical, top-down alignment or in smaller horizontal letters. Instead, they make
you crane your neck and stretch to the right to see the title and author. It’s
not so bad for the top few rows but by the time you get to the bottom, you have
to squat, 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 I walk around in
public after a book search, I’m listing to the right, my neck is bent in the
same direction, dust is on my knees and the rest of my clothes are soiled and
rumpled, you get the look! The one that says, “What has that old coot been up
to? Is he homeless?
What is it about book
publishers? Literate, educated to the point of being highbrow and with all the
knowledge of the world passing through their hands, yet they haven’t figured
out how to print titles on books so you can read them when they’re stacked on a
bookshelf?
And, what about the poor
authors whose books end up on the bottom row. A modern-day Shakespeare could 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.
Well, at least the Hudson
Books people have figured it out. Turn the books so customers can shop with
ease and stack the duplicates behind them.
Comments? Send to
mlessler7@gmail.com
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