Judging Readers By the Covers

 Once every year, our community has a big book sale to raise money for the local library. For most of the previous year, boxes of books were collected in a few locations, mostly people dropping off ones they no longer wanted. Those books were eventually consolidated to an upstairs floor of a venue where later the book sale will be held. This year by the luck of being in the wrong/right place at the right/wrong time, I was asked to volunteer in sorting those books into various categories and I accepted.

An hour later, I was up on the second floor, pulling books out of a large cardboard box and putting them on other tables in one of about two dozen different categories. It wasn't a lot of heavy lifting but it was quite a bit of walking. What I enjoyed the most however was pulling books out of a box and mulling over who the reader might have been or what the reader was like. 

Boxes full of romance novels likely belonged to older women (and perhaps some younger) who had not had good luck in the romance department for one reason or another. Other boxes full of westerns were likewise, probably older men looking to escape the realities of their current life by reliving days long past. Occasionally there were boxes full of random novels and some non-fiction but not often. For every three boxes mostly full of westerns or romance novels, we might see a box with something else in it.

One box I sorted were fictional western books, every single one of them, except one. The one odd ball was "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee" is a non-fiction book that I have read that recounts the systematic destruction of Indians in the second half of the 19th century. Judging from its more pristine cover compared to the well worn of the pulp westerns that filled the box, it was obvious to me that whomever bought it solely based upon the name and after discovering what it was about, immediately stopped reading it.

Others, left me completely befuddled, such as the guidebook to 1980's San Francisco that had an entire chapter devoted to the best S & M Bed and Breakfast places in the city. I had no idea such things existed and not I'm slightly worried that I may accidentally check into one someday and wake up tied to my bed. The other two people helping me sort and I pondered whether we should even put it out since it is dated and questionable in the subject matter department but all being someone liberal thinkers when it comes to reading material, put it in the Travel section all the same. One of the others commented that we should tag it to see who buys it. I immediately said I had no desire what so ever to know who buys it. Such knowledge like that might change my perspective entirely if it were someone I knew.

Besides judging those who read the books previously, I was also somewhat judging the books themselves. My favorite title of the day goes to a book called "The Chocolate Clown Corpse" by Joanna Carl. I have no idea what the book was about but whomever came up with the name and the cover design, a chocolate clown shoe with a large bite missing out of it, is surely a genius. 

The name of it escaped my mind but I found a book, several hundred pages long, broken into chapters full of possible phrases one might see in a romance novel in a particular situation. My neighbor happens to be a romance novelist of some fame and was one of the people sorting so I showed her the book. She was less than thrilled about the author of that book. I wasn't sure of all the reasons why but I wasn't interested enough to ask any further.

Finally after several hours, we were all tuckered out from walking perhaps miles on concrete to deliver books to the correct category so they can be properly staged the weekend of the book sale. I gave the other two my number if they needed any more help later on as the sale is still a month away. One advantage to volunteering is that as I sorted through the few non-fiction books, I picked out a few that looked really interesting (that I haven't already read) and took them home with me with a promise to settle up on the day of the book sale. Working with a romance novelist and a fellow more interested in DVD's which we also collected and sorted versus books, I didn't have any competition over the books I had found. They each had stacks of their own.