Dewey Decimal Fight

[owlectomy]

Today I have been restickering some of the books that the distributor got wrong.

"Organizing Your Life" marked as 133.3 (Tarot, feng shui, runes, numerology, etc.)
"Teach Yourself Spanish" marked as 868.2 (Near the Spanish literature, at least, but quite distant from the Spanish language section)
"Blade of the Immortal," complete with topless woman on the cover, marked as Juvenile (i.e. under-12) graphic novel. (And we let it get out on the shelves like that! I caught it before it got checked out, but still...)

I find their lack of proofreading disturbing. Especially since the average price to process a book is approximately equal to the price of the book itself.

Comments

[lordameth.livejournal.com]

It's always gotten on my nerves that libraries and bookstores alike lump things together without considering the content or the intended audience of things - particularly graphic novels, a medium which spans all genres and which is constantly representing more and more mature material (I don't mean "mature material" in the sense of porn or violence, I mean in terms of addressing serious issues and like that).

I once spent an hour looking through a comicbook store (a specialty shop, where they ought to know what they're doing) looking for Usagi Yojimbo. I finally asked someone where to find it, and it was in the manga section. I turned to the staffer (poor guy, as if it was his fault) and explained that Usagi is written in English, by an American, and that no one in Japan has ever heard of it. Hence, it is not manga. (I think I took it too far that time - that was an awfully geeky and obnoxious thing to do. But the point remains the same - if you're going to have a categorization system, categorize things correctly.)

:)