I was at Barnes and Noble the other day and as always I went to the history book section. And of course there is the "New Arrival" shelf.
There were 33 new history books.
32 of them was about wars: Civil Wars, WWII, giant coffee table books of picture of people in chain mail, writeups of missions and campaigns in Iraq, etc etc. The one non-war history book? A book on cocktails, which judging purely on the cover seems more about the variety of alcoholic beverages than the evolutions thereof.
Aside from the fact that it is a gross distortion of the human experience: war, while an integral part of history, is most definitely less than 32/33rd of the totality of human experience- I'm not even sure this is a good business strategy. Of the top 20 bestselling history books on amazon.com, only 3 of the 20 books explicitly deal with wars as such (5 if you count books on Lincoln).
Marketwise, I think those 32 new books might be crowding each other out to some extent; how hany war books can one seriously consume at any point in time?
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Mille m...
5 years ago
2 comments:
Perhaps it's your bookstore. I was just at the Borders bookstore three blocks from my house, and its two stand-up shelves of featured new history books included several books on wars, or related to war, but not the 32:1 ratio you saw.
I noted that the featured new arrivals included:
"Thames: A biograhy" by Peter Ackroyd; "The Ascent of Money" by Niall Fergusson; "Visual History of the English Bible" by Donald L. Brake; "Our Magnificient Bastard Tongue: the untold story of English" by John McWhorter; "The Age of Entanglement: when quantum physics was reborn" by Louisa Gilder; "Champlain's Dream" by David Hackett Fischer; "Book of Ages" by Eric Hanson.
and I'd like to note that one book I've been eyeing for a few months, "Birth of the Cool" by Armstrong is in the art section, but is on the mid 20th century emergence of California design and art, is in the art section.
in fact, not just art history, you'll probably find local history in the local/Southern California section; ethnic group history in those specific areas; history of science/exploration in the science section; biographies in the bios; true crime in true crime.
there's more history in your local BnN, I'm sure it's just the way it's organized.
Maybe you live in an area that has a lot of vets or something. Big stores are notorious for their marketing skills, especially places like supermarkets which put junk food on eye level for kids. Perhaps some research was done for the store in your area and that's what they found??
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