Re: Re: RE: Re: RARA-AVIS: Ellroy reviewd at Salon: after all

From: jjnevins@ix.netcom.com
Date: 13 Jun 2001


rara-avis@icomm.ca wrote:
> Jess wrote:

"In my years as a public librarian I've come to see something almost sinister about it. . . . Because, I'm beginning to think, the publishers feel that if they put them in genre ghettos, where they properly belong, they won't sell or circulate."

> Interesting. I always assumed mysteries were among the best
> circulators in libraries.

Oh, they are. All genre fiction--mysteries, science fiction, westerns, romances--circulate far more than "mainstream" fiction. And I'm quite certain that they gross, per capita, far more in the bookstores, too.

And yet given the slightest opportunity publishers will classify a book as "Fiction" rather than leaving them in the genre they deserve.

Why? Traditional intellectual hostility to genre fiction, I think, and a subconscious (or not) desire for respectability.

> Also, does this mean the publishers define the library placement,
> not the librarians?

In large part, yeah, although the cataloguers in libraries have final control over that. But--and I'm not a cataloguer--from my vantage point it seems that most cataloguers usually go along with what the publishers tell them.

jess

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