Then you get to the electronic music, and realize that there’s a hundred sub-genres and the drum and bass doesn’t really go with the true techno, or that nu-skool breaks doesn’t really have much to do with happy hardcore etc.

Or should you split country music into two sections, post-1980 and pre-1980?

You get what I mean, this seems like a hassle to set up for books, and potentially a hassle for the customers as well (It should be in the UK section!

Except that I don’t know how a person could be in two places at once, and the same goes for fictional people in books, unless they’re Wolverine.

Besides, if a book deals with multiple locations, they could always order multiple copies and shelve each copy under one of the appropriate countries.

The Altair travel bookstores (in Spain) have been doing this for at least 13 yrs, as well as Daunt Books in London.

I guess you could have a scanable tag on a book indicating which section the customer got it from, so you know where you need to restock, but that’s the kind of thing people get worried about: the little consumer micro-tags coming out that document an absurd amount of information about customers without their permission. Plus people pick up books and reshelve them at random–I’ve had a lot of trouble with bookshops reading something in stock but being unable to find it because it was either stolen or misplaced.

Generally though, I love the idea of creative organisation, even if this isn’t the most out there example. For instance the Tate Modern may not be the most radical museum ever, but I definitely appreciated how different paintings seemed to mean different things when classed according to subject or colour etc. as opposed to period or school as in most museums. The world is a dynamic place where things tend not to fall into clearly demarcated categories, and I’m not sure the benefits gained by efficiency outweigh the flat monotony of pretending things can be easily and definitively placed in categories. When you really need a book no matter how a place is organised you almost always need to ask the staff to look it up on the computer to find out where it is, so might as well make browsing into an experience, rather then a failed attempt to facilitate a customer’s trip from a to b, no book to book to door.

It would make a good idea for a temporary travel-related display in a public library, too.

A random series of events led me to read “Prague” by Arthur Phillips (which is not about Prague at all, but rather about Budapest) shortly before my first trip to Hungary. Since he lived in Budapest himself before writing the book, all the places the characters visited were real. This made my trip to Budapest extremely enjoyable, as I could avoid tourist traps but have my own private guided tour.

Bookworm: “Hi, I looked under Literature for ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’ but didn’t find it. Do you have it in stock?”

Frustrated poet with an English Degree behind the counter: “Hmmm…the computer says we have one copy, let’s check the Irish travel section, the Catholicism rebellion section, The ‘Desmond From LOST’s Fave Reads‘ endcap, behind the returns desk, and any number of other kooky places to see if we can track it down.”

If your future blind date’s Facebook page says she’s really into William Carlos Williams and you want to do some pre-date cramming (so to speak) where do you start?

Then again, when I was at Tower Records we always joked about putting every single CD in alphabetical order and calling it “World” music since it was all recorded on the planet, so I may have thought about this junk too much.

Last time I checked, they have titles on China, Costa Rica, Cuba, Prague, Amsterdam, Greece, and Japan. Definitely worth a look—you might even be able to find them at Idlewild.