Today's Reading

INTRODUCTION: PLATO AND THE PLANOGRAM

I've been a book nut since my mom introduced me to a certain cat in a hat. In school, I got in trouble for ignoring my teachers by reading under my desk. My parents often told me to put my reading away at the dinner table, and the back pocket of my jeans was invariably stretched out in the shape of a mass-market paperback. Hell, I'd even read while walking down the street. Trailing behind my brother and sister, I'd slam into lampposts and trash cans. I'm not kidding.

In college, I tried to support my reading habit by getting a job in a Barnes & Noble, lured in by the smell of fresh pulp and that juicy employee discount. It was a brand-new store in North Charleston, South Carolina, just a huge space full of empty shelves. A week before opening, a tractor trailer backed up and disgorged pallet after pallet piled high with unopened boxes of fresh books.

My first job as a young bookseller was to fill those empty shelves before the grand opening. Amazingly, there was a dedicated place for every single book. This was my introduction to "planograms," an industry term for a detailed schematic showing where each book should be placed on every table and shelf. Almost immediately, I saw how often this plan defied logic and common sense.

Horror had its own section, but Frankenstein belonged in general fiction. Science fiction and fantasy were lumped together, but Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, 1984, and anything by Michael Crichton could also be found in general fiction. So was Stephen King. And Kurt Vonnegut. In the years ahead, I would spend a considerable amount of my workday guiding a confused shopper away from the logical place they started their search to some other spot in the bookstore.

The Time Machine? That's in the classics. War of the Worlds too. They get shelved with The Odyssey, when it would perhaps make sense to shelve The Odyssey in fantasy.

It didn't take long for me to see nefarious purposes behind these planograms. Folks who love Literature with a capital L seemed to be protecting their disdain for science fiction and fantasy by removing anything from those sections that had merit or gained wide appeal with the masses. This explained why major bestsellers like King, Shelley, and Vonnegut went in the general fiction section. And classics that everyone was familiar with were taken out of the SF/F realm as well. If your premise was that these nerdy genres didn't matter, an easy way to prove the point was to rob science fiction and fantasy of the works you think matter.

My conspiratorial thinking felt confirmed when I worked in an independent bookstore many years later while trying to make it as a writer. Once again, science fiction and fantasy were lumped together, and any book my boss thought he'd like to read was removed and shelved elsewhere. In logic, we call this "begging the question," where you set up conditions so they prove your point. The science fiction and fantasy section of the bookstore felt like a field left to go fallow. When Hunger Games took off during those years, we set up its own table to avoid putting anything so popular in the far, dim reaches of the bookstore. As an aspiring sci-fi writer, I quietly fumed.

When I learned how much Plato hated poets, things began to make more sense.

There are ten sections, or "books," of Plato's Republic—a classic work that attempts to define the perfect society. Two of those ten books are mostly about how much Plato hates poets and poetry. No joke. By appealing to emotions rather than sticking to facts, Plato accused poets of poisoning our minds. By writing what isn't instead of what is or ought to be, they endanger his perfect society. In his own words:

And the same may be said of lust and anger and all the other affections, of desire and pain and pleasure, which are held to be inseparable from every action—in all of them poetry feeds and waters the passions instead of drying them up; she lets them rule, although they ought to be controlled, if mankind are ever to increase in happiness and virtue.

He goes on to suggest that only religious tales and biographies of powerful people should be allowed, and I suspect he has this opinion in order to not be struck down by either:

[B]ut we must remain firm in our conviction that hymns to the gods and praises of famous men are the only poetry which ought to be admitted into our State. For if you go beyond this and allow the honeyed muse to enter, either in epic or lyric verse, not law and the reason of mankind, which by common consent have ever been deemed best, but pleasure and pain will be the rulers in our State.
...

Join an online "Book Club" and start receiving sample chapters from popular books in your daily email. Every day, Monday through Friday, we'll send you a portion of a book that takes only five minutes to read. Each Monday we begin a new book and by Friday you will have the chance to read 2 or 3 chapters, enough to know if it's a book you want to finish. You can read a wide variety of books including fiction, nonfiction, romance, business, teen and mystery books. Just give us your email address and five minutes a day, and we'll give you an exciting world of reading.

What our readers think...

Read Book

Today's Reading

INTRODUCTION: PLATO AND THE PLANOGRAM

I've been a book nut since my mom introduced me to a certain cat in a hat. In school, I got in trouble for ignoring my teachers by reading under my desk. My parents often told me to put my reading away at the dinner table, and the back pocket of my jeans was invariably stretched out in the shape of a mass-market paperback. Hell, I'd even read while walking down the street. Trailing behind my brother and sister, I'd slam into lampposts and trash cans. I'm not kidding.

In college, I tried to support my reading habit by getting a job in a Barnes & Noble, lured in by the smell of fresh pulp and that juicy employee discount. It was a brand-new store in North Charleston, South Carolina, just a huge space full of empty shelves. A week before opening, a tractor trailer backed up and disgorged pallet after pallet piled high with unopened boxes of fresh books.

My first job as a young bookseller was to fill those empty shelves before the grand opening. Amazingly, there was a dedicated place for every single book. This was my introduction to "planograms," an industry term for a detailed schematic showing where each book should be placed on every table and shelf. Almost immediately, I saw how often this plan defied logic and common sense.

Horror had its own section, but Frankenstein belonged in general fiction. Science fiction and fantasy were lumped together, but Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, 1984, and anything by Michael Crichton could also be found in general fiction. So was Stephen King. And Kurt Vonnegut. In the years ahead, I would spend a considerable amount of my workday guiding a confused shopper away from the logical place they started their search to some other spot in the bookstore.

The Time Machine? That's in the classics. War of the Worlds too. They get shelved with The Odyssey, when it would perhaps make sense to shelve The Odyssey in fantasy.

It didn't take long for me to see nefarious purposes behind these planograms. Folks who love Literature with a capital L seemed to be protecting their disdain for science fiction and fantasy by removing anything from those sections that had merit or gained wide appeal with the masses. This explained why major bestsellers like King, Shelley, and Vonnegut went in the general fiction section. And classics that everyone was familiar with were taken out of the SF/F realm as well. If your premise was that these nerdy genres didn't matter, an easy way to prove the point was to rob science fiction and fantasy of the works you think matter.

My conspiratorial thinking felt confirmed when I worked in an independent bookstore many years later while trying to make it as a writer. Once again, science fiction and fantasy were lumped together, and any book my boss thought he'd like to read was removed and shelved elsewhere. In logic, we call this "begging the question," where you set up conditions so they prove your point. The science fiction and fantasy section of the bookstore felt like a field left to go fallow. When Hunger Games took off during those years, we set up its own table to avoid putting anything so popular in the far, dim reaches of the bookstore. As an aspiring sci-fi writer, I quietly fumed.

When I learned how much Plato hated poets, things began to make more sense.

There are ten sections, or "books," of Plato's Republic—a classic work that attempts to define the perfect society. Two of those ten books are mostly about how much Plato hates poets and poetry. No joke. By appealing to emotions rather than sticking to facts, Plato accused poets of poisoning our minds. By writing what isn't instead of what is or ought to be, they endanger his perfect society. In his own words:

And the same may be said of lust and anger and all the other affections, of desire and pain and pleasure, which are held to be inseparable from every action—in all of them poetry feeds and waters the passions instead of drying them up; she lets them rule, although they ought to be controlled, if mankind are ever to increase in happiness and virtue.

He goes on to suggest that only religious tales and biographies of powerful people should be allowed, and I suspect he has this opinion in order to not be struck down by either:

[B]ut we must remain firm in our conviction that hymns to the gods and praises of famous men are the only poetry which ought to be admitted into our State. For if you go beyond this and allow the honeyed muse to enter, either in epic or lyric verse, not law and the reason of mankind, which by common consent have ever been deemed best, but pleasure and pain will be the rulers in our State.
...

Join an online "Book Club" and start receiving sample chapters from popular books in your daily email. Every day, Monday through Friday, we'll send you a portion of a book that takes only five minutes to read. Each Monday we begin a new book and by Friday you will have the chance to read 2 or 3 chapters, enough to know if it's a book you want to finish. You can read a wide variety of books including fiction, nonfiction, romance, business, teen and mystery books. Just give us your email address and five minutes a day, and we'll give you an exciting world of reading.

What our readers think...