A point that's been overlooked in the discussion so far is that people
employed in any given shop are there to make decisions about where books go.
They are paid to think about it, and to organise their stocks. This means
there are opportunities for geographers - and in particular,
human/cultural/social geographers.
A halfway decent bookseller - clerks included - knows a lot about what's on
the shelves. Organisation is not done by computer and robots, but by
ordinary people. Nor is it necessarily done from afar, in some centralised
or hierarchical way. One consequence of re-locating books is that the people
who know the arrangements won't be able to find a book, and may think it's
out of stock or stolen. So it makes sense to engage with those people, even
if it's to complain.
More interesting would be to develop a dialogue about the place of
geography, the placement of books, and the roles of both geographers and
booksellers in those placements. A practice of this sort could do a lot for
the public reception of geography. I imagine that anyone who's published has
some relationship with a counterpart in the book trade - but does this
extend to a dialogue with people in bookshops? And what might be
accomplished by developing such a dialogue on a broad basis, so that this
particular discipline became known for its engagement with booksellers and
bookshops? Lots of things could happen along that line of thought.
Another way of making the point is that in a discussion about bookshops,
*human* geographers would do well to engage with other humans, in ways that
acknowledge the intellectual and other works performed by people in
bookshops. It's not about the books.
David
-----Original Message-----
From: A forum for critical and radical geographers
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Dr Hillary Shaw
Sent: 04 September 2006 21:21
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Fwd: Take action to save geography - a message for human geographe
rs
In the centre of Southampoton we have a book store that, because it's
located right next to a section of Southampton Solent University Campus,
sees itself as serving mainly that institution (I asked the shop why their
geography section was so limited) - I would disagree, in that location they
are serving the general public of Southampton. Southampton is in fact
woefully short on bookshops, having basically little else in this line apart
from WH Smith and the bookshop 3 miles out of town at the University of
Southampton.
Visit most HE-oriented bookshops, and you will find their geograophy
sections are geared towards the specialisms of the geog dept of that
institution. OK, it maximises profit per sq foot, but this is a shame
especially for a subject one of whose main attractions and benefits is that
it connects with so much else.
Hillary Shaw, Southampton
Dave Featherstone <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
I like the blurring of boundaries idea- I once found a copy of Henri
Lefebvre's
Production of Space in the Astronomy section in Waterstone's in
Liverpool...
Quoting Carl Griffin :
> Duncan,
>
> Quite. All book chain stores have taken a noticeable turn away
from
> keeping non-technical, non-specialist stock. As such the way in
which what
> appears on the shelves of the vast majority of bookshops does not
reflect
> ANY academic discipline as it stands today. Try walking into a
branch of
> Waterstones and finding a classic - and massive seller - like EP
> Thompson's 'The Making of the English Working Class'! Maps,
atlases etc
> merely represent the public face of what the non-academic
geography
> community (i.e. the vast majority of the population) perceive to
be the
> geographers stock-in-trade.
>
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