A recent conversation in our Tips, links and suggestions column drew attention to a strange phenomenon: booksellers are taking an ever more creative approach to the labelling of their shelves. A visit to Waterstones' London Piccadilly branch revealed a 'cosy crime' section featuring a novel that was surely written with these very shelves in mind: James Anderson's The Affair of the Blood-stained Egg Cosy.
But the trend doesn't stop with retro-crime, as MsCarey pointed out:
I made a trip to my nearest big town today. In addition to Waterstones and Oxfam Books I decided to check out the book selection at W.H. Smith. Not bad as it turned out (in a book-related emergency I could find something there) but the most striking aspect of the book dept was a whole section named Tragic Life Stories. This was a strange and terrible thing. Starting off with memoirs (Call the Midwife) it then moved on to a solid phalanx of novels by a limited number of authors producing work ranging from East End deprivation to honour killings. Evidently a whole new type of genre fiction.
The most terrible thing I saw was in the travel literature section at Oxfam Books. It was called England, Our England and "compiled and illustrated" by Alan Titchmarsh. This was sitting next to Colin Thubron and Mark Tully.
But this type of micro-sectioning can also lead to fun incidents. Rumour has it that Shirley Williams's memoir Climbing the Bookshelves was once found in a Mountaineering section. Although we unfortunately don't have pictorial evidence of that lovely display mishap, we are sure that you can provide us with other examples.
Let us know about any you have spotted on your travels. Do you think that anything goes, or should booksellers take a more conservative line when organising titles?
Here is what a few of our followers on Twitter had to say about it:
@GuardianBooks at Dymocks, Melbourne, Australia on the first trip with my girl 😀💘 pic.twitter.com/CrC8j4bbpE
— Ashley*지영 (@Bhaktilove108) April 24, 2014
@GuardianBooks my local Barnes and Noble had a section "Books about Books" with the subsection "grammer."
— James Pomar (@JamesPomar) April 24, 2014
@GuardianBooks We've got a section called "Cheap 'n' Dirty".
— kafekerouacbooks (@booksatkerouac) April 24, 2014
@GuardianBooks 'paranormal teen fiction'in LA Barnes & Noble caught my eye.Why not teen or supernatural?Maybe on the back of recent movies?
— @dcampion (@danielwcampion) April 24, 2014
And here is a selection of your contributions in the thread below:
For a short while the local Waterstones had a "Walthamstow Noir" section.
As seen in Shakespeare & Co. on Broadway:
"Books by Paul Auster now reside in the Drinking, Smoking & Screwing section."
Heffers in Cambridge has a second-hand section that is separated by subject, leading to the delights of 'second-hand philosophy'
The Inner Bookshop in Oxford has a section called "Secondhand Buddhism", which somehow seems to sum up the New Age movement as a whole.
I found '54' by Wu Ming in, I think, 'Chinese literature' in Waterstones in Leeds.
Thematically, the novel has nothing to do with China. And the 'author' was actually a collective of five Italian writers - no Chinese connection there either. Presumably, an authorship with an Asian-sounding name is enough for a work to be classified as unmistakably Chinese, regardless of topic.
Back in the 80s I volnteered in a radical bookshop that put 'Protect and Survive' in Comedy. A book by David Owen about the SDP was filed as 'DIY'.
London's Forbidden Planet used to have a good section (when it was a bookshop) called 'Slipstream', with Baudrillard, Pynchon, Bruno Schultz, Mischa and Ferret, the first two Nicholson Baker books and Angela Carter. Now it has 'Macho Dudes With Guns' for the (mainly Baen books) military-fetish SF.
Goodreads lists "knitting mysteries" as a genre https://www.goodreads.com/genres/knitting-mysteries