Next Week?!
Well here’s a surprise – things are speeding up. The book is not coming out on October 28 after all, it’s coming out next week. It will be in all good bookshops (and, let us hope, in all bad ones as well, and mediocre ones besides, as well as adequate, so-so, okay, crapulous, and pathetic ones) for your viewing and buying pleasure. And I’ll be able to get off the plane and take my tiny red eyes into the first bookshop I see and there it will be (unless it isn’t). (Perhaps it won’t be because there will have been a rush and all copies will have sold out. Because people are finding it funny, you know. People at Smiths, for instance.)
And now here’s where you get to do your part. Not content with urging you to order it at Amazon, I have a further suggestion. This is what you do instead of subscribing or donating or looking at horrible adverts for low carb diets or sex toys. This is where you help keep the proprietors of B&W in bread and dripping for awhile longer. If you see the book at Smiths, you buy it. Here’s why: they’re starting small, at Smiths, and will only order more if the book actually sells. So if all our thousands upon thousands of regular readers grab every copy in Smiths, why, the nice people at Smiths will be running around the room squawking and slapping their foreheads in their urgency to order more copies. And that will be good.
This has been a public service announcement. Now back to your regular programming.
I wonder if my number one fan Fryslan will buy a copy! :-)
So just to confirm – we are to buy it from Amazon and also from Smiths. Nix on the sex toys. And shoot the queen in the 9th inning.
ok boss!
And Waterstone’s as well. Just to be on the safe-side.
Waterstone’s has a cool lounge where one may browse in comfort… so do I really really really have to… yes, I suppose I do.
what about a bit of guerrilla bookshop reorganisation – putting the dictionary in prominent or dissonant places. I’ll leave it to you to pick the author whose work you would most like to occlude!
That’s funny. I’ve been doing that for a couple of years – whenever I go into a bookstore that has New British Philosophy and/or What Philosophers Think I turn it face out to make it more conspicuous. A little innocent fun.
Trouble is it has been the exact same copies of New British Philosophy and What Philosophers Think for these past two years!
Yup! They’re all smeary with my fingerprints by now!
cackle
I often gain some playful bookshop amusement by re-filing pseudo-science in fiction.
Ah…I used to move Ayn Rand out of philosophy (?!!), in the days when I had more time. Very playful and postmodern of us, isn’t it.
Our local Chapters-Indigo used to shelve _Skeptic_ , _Free Inquiry_,
and _Skeptical Inquirer_ next to the
pseudoscience, ufology and astrology
periodicals. I thought this quite commendable. A reader of the latter might have picked up one of the former
by mistake, catching a dose of skepticism in the process.
The oddest thing I’ve seen in the States – which we don’t get over here – is the Metaphysics section you get in the bookshops, which is things like angels and the lost city of Atlantis.
The temptation to stick Hegel in there as well has been very hard to resist.
That’s really funny. A guy I know (a PhD in history and very widely-read) works at Barnes & Noble and when people ask for metaphysical books he responds exactly that way. ‘Would you like to start with Hegel?’ he will ask them earnestly.
The Metaphysics thing really is irritating though. Kind of the opposite of putting Free Inquiry etc next to the astrology. (Not to mention the brazen misappropriation of the word.)