In this age of limited time, most people enter a bookstore with a specific goal:    to buy a book on parenting, or one on animal behavior, or the next novel selected by their book club.  Maybe the reason is not even to buy a book but to have a cup of coffee (see Feb. 21’s entry) or to test a CD. The number of people poking around for nothing in particular in unusual today.  My husband––and I, by extension––discovered just how weird a bookstore’s collection can be.  When I was on tour in North Carolina and South Carolina, my husband found himself with hours to kill while I signed books.  Although he found the usual list of bestsellers, he also discovered the off-beat.  From the children’s book Walter the Farting Dog to Vincent Bugliosi’s massive tome on debunking Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories to one asserting that the Chinese may have discovered the Americas prior to Columbus to one claiming that the government has hidden the “truth” about structures on Mars, bookshelves carried both the ridiculous and the subversive, offering  a strange glimpse into the world of book publishing and selling.

Independent bookstore inventories tend to be quirkier (and to readers like me, often more interesting) than the superstores since the latter are stocked based on remote, corporate decisions; however, even the superstores sell the unusual.  The Weird (insert your state here) series, stemming from the success of the magazine Weird New Jersey, seems to be popular in every bookstore.  Finding the series in not strange in itself, but seeing what each book offers delves into the bizarre.  For example, Weird Carolinas devotes a page to Monkey Island, a ocean-enclosed piece of land where monkeys live in wild and reproduce, only to be captured later for research.  (Those who have read Captivity know where I stand on this practice.) Interspersed in the craziness were signed copies of critically acclaimed but still relatively unknown novels, gorgeous art and photography books, and intriguing explorations of the past. 

I believe that the both bookstores and the reading public take fewer chances today because we simply don’t have the time to explore. If we don’t read a review of a book or if someone doesn’t urge us to read it, we remain ignorant of its existence. Or we pass over it even though it sits next to the book we came for.  As newspapers shrink their book review sections, we run the risk of missing the book that will change the way we see the world.  I urge readers of this blog to spend 30 extra minutes in a bookstore this month or to click on related links in an online store.  You may not find anything of interest, but at least you will have explored beyond your usual sphere.

Copyright 2008 by Debbie Lee Wesselmann