The Book Sense 76
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In Josephine Tey's elegant mystery novel The Daughter of Time, Inspector Alan Grant, confined to bed after an accident and deluged with the latest bestsellers by well-meaning hospital visitors, muses:

Was everyone nowadays thrilled to a formula? Authors today wrote so much to a pattern that their public expected it. The public talked about "a new Silas Weekley" or "a new Lavinia Fitch" exactly as they talked about "a new brick" or "a new hairbrush." They never said "a new book by" whoever it might be. Their interest was not in the book but in its newness. They knew quite well what the book would be like.

This sort of branding of a particular name is big business in publishing today. And one of the things that helps to create this sort of success is a certain degree of continuity, which publishers try and build through coordinated packaging and design, a degree of prolificacy so as not to lose the public's attention, and following success with something similar enough as to not lose that initial audience.

Booksellers are likewise interested in building on an author's success by having a new book to place beside the first--or fiftieth. The already-read title serves as a touchstone for the customer, and is an endorsement to the contented reader to consider the author's other work. So if an author jumps genres, it is difficult for this sort of shelving arrangement to work as one title might, for example, be in the mystery section, a second in romance, and a third in general fiction.

I believe the very concept of genres emerged along these principles, as a sort of implicit recommendation: placing similar books by different authors beside wildly successful works. If you liked Stephen King, this horror novel by a new writer is of the same "type". Creating a brand name out of an author is essentially creating a type of "genre" solely from one writer's oeuvre.

For all that I've been fairly prolific in the past half decade, I've not been easy to shelve in one place. This has been done with no ill will toward poor booksellers, trying to sell my work, I aver! (And I am a lapsed bookseller, myself, having worked at two independents in Manhattan, the children's bookstore Books of Wonder and the recently-closed gay and lesbian bookshop A Different Light.)

I've published a cookbook, a biography, books of fiction, of poetry, and of essays, anthologies collecting the work of diverse authors and books solely of my own writing, books of astrology, books of regional interest, books of erotica, and many others, scattered all throughout different sections of a bookstore.

But perhaps more importantly, many of my books combine two or more genres or interests -- working as a sort of bridge between two communities, perhaps, but quite often being shelved only in one or the other. Cross-shelving complicates keeping track of store inventories and is often incompatible with the computer systems many bookstores use.

My first collection of short stories, The Drag Queen of Elfland, is a book of lesbian and gay fantasies and fairy tale retellings. Should this book be shelved in the gay section or in the science fiction/fantasy section? As I have published other titles which fall wholly within both of these possible "genres," I have separate audiences in each section who might be interest in this title that straddles both themes. If the book is shelved only in one section, the book will likely escape the attention of customers who ordinarily patronize the other section. It is often unlikely for someone who defines him or herself as heterosexual to browse the gay and lesbian section looking for a book to read, whereas if this same title is presented to them in the general fiction section or within a genre they follow, they will have no prejudices against purchasing and enjoying the book.

My most recent anthology, Kosher Meat, concerns itself equally with Jewish identity and gay sexuality. Should it be shelved in Judaica, in a gay and lesbian section, or even in erotica if a bookstore has a section devoted to the subject? Who will be looking for the book, one might ask? As it's been widely reviewed in the gay press, the Jewish press, the erotica/sexuality press, and also the mainstream press, the answer would be any and all of the above, depending on where a customer has read about the book. The shelving of this book is further complicated by the fact that it is a mix of memoir and fiction, which can sometimes confuse the issue worse than mixed genres.

Even when a book falls wholly within one arena -- say gay and lesbian interest -- I've often tried to bridge two sub-groups or communities. Lesbians and gay men are perhaps frequently political bedfellows, but gender provides a divide within the homosexual reading community that's hard to surmount. Mixed-gender titles sell more poorly than single-sex ones within homosocial circles, although it's a personal crusade I believe strongly in. Often, gay or lesbian authors will complain to me that heterosexuals do not read their books. My usual response is to ask when the last time they'd read a book by a lesbian if the author is a gay man, or vice versa.

A book such as my anthology Switch Hitters: Lesbians Write Gay Male Erotica and Gay Men Write Lesbian Erotica (co-edited with Carol Queen) created a quandary within specialty queer bookshops: should it be shelved with men's erotica or women's erotica?

The shelving of books of gay or lesbian interest is a dilemma, in general, for the specialist bookstore: should lesbian and gay fiction titles be integrated in an über-fiction section which is simply alphabetical by author, or shelved separately by gender? When one chooses to separate the fiction section, so many further dilemmas result: does one shelve books by the sexual preferences of the content or of the author? If a lesbian author writes a novel about gay male characters (say Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Catch Trap) should it be filed under gay male or under lesbian? And what about books by heterosexuals about gay or lesbian characters? Or authors whose sexual practice and preferences remain pruriently unknown? And what about books by openly lesbian or gay authors with no gay or lesbian "content" to them? (Oh, the many nightmares that face the discerning bookseller!)

While I argue for maintaining the separate gay male and lesbian erotica sections -- sex is such a personal subject, and the contents of one type of publication (not to mention the patrons browsing same) are very likely to upset the sensibility of the other's -- I am in favor of the mixed fiction category, which also accommodated the few crossover titles and other difficult-to-shelve authors and titles (such as the recent spate of transsexual novels).

The advent of online bookselling has been a curious thing. I have never bought anything online -- be it books or plane tickets or what-have-you -- but I am in a rare, rapidly-diminishing Luddite minority. For me, this type of shopping lacks the aspect of serendipity that I so love about a bookstore. As an undergraduate at Yale University, I was in heaven with access to 16 million volumes of open stacks in the library system. Whenever I was researching a paper, quite often the most important titles turned out to be next to the one which showed up on my computer search, or across the aisle from it, but didn't show up on the computer because I'd asked for the wrong keyword or it had been improperly entered.

Friends who look me up on online booksellers have even dropped me a quick email to let me know that there is another writer with my same byline when they come across the entry for a biography of Venus and Serena Williams I wrote for Andrews McMeel. A sports book seems so far removed from everything else I've published, that many are dubious that the author of that book and I can really be one and the same. Quite often, the first response from people who know me on finding out that I wrote this book is to comment something along the lines of, "I didn't know Venus and Serena were lesbians," because, as shown in the Josephine Tey quote, they already have an idea of what "the new Lawrence Schimel" should be about, and don't want their expectations frustrated. At least when I published my cookbook Food for Life and Other Dish, the contributors were all gay and lesbian celebrities collaborating on an AIDS benefit project, so it "made sense" to friends who knew my background in a way that a non-queer sports biography baffles them. The cookbook, however, proved problematic for booksellers; when it was shelved in cooking, the book was essentially lost among the innumerable titles focusing on specific types of cuisines or by famous chefs. While my cookbook is chock-full of real usable recipes, its primary appeal is to the literary reader interested in Tony Kushner talking about why a play is like a lasagna as he details the recipe for same, or fans of Dorothy Allison who read about sinful red velvet cake in Trash and want to try to recreate this erotic story in their own lives. The contributors are not all authors--although many of the celebrities such as Martina Navratilova and RuPaul have published books -- but the book's appeal is more the interested reader who is willing to buy an interesting collection of recipes and musings on food (especially since all the royalties are donated to meals-on-wheels programs feeding people with AIDS) rather than that hungry bookbrowser seeking a book to learn how to create a specific type of cuisine or recreate the experience of a Name Brand chef or restaurant, and thus needs to be shelved someplace where the first type of bookbuyer will come across it, in the anthologies or the gay and lesbian section of a general bookstore. (Obviously, the same bookbuyer can patronize both possible types of section, but he or she is usually looking for different types of books in each.)

Ursula K. Le Guin, in her brilliant essay collection Dancing at the Edge of the World, wittily devised a key, a la the Guide Michelin, to indicate to readers the general tenor of a particular piece--in this case, literature, feminism, social responsibility, and travel--to guide one toward one's interests or allow one to skip over pieces that hold little appeal. Not unsurprisingly, given her ability to write so well in such a wide range of formats and about so many things, more than one symbol often follows many of the essay titles on the table of contents.

I sometimes think I should consider a similar system, as a blueprint for readers and booksellers both.

Three favorite difficult-to-shelve authors:

Nancy Willard is a polymath, writing both prose and verse, for adults and for children, always with grace and skill. She has even illustrated books, both her own and those of other authors! Middlebury has published A Nancy Willard Reader, which collects a good sampling of her poetry, stories, and essays, for all ages. Telling Time is her wonderful and wonder-filled collection of essays about writing.

Philip Ridley is a British author best known in this country for his plays published by Methuen or various children's books from different houses. His first adult novel, In the Eyes of Mr Fury, was published by Penguin in a lovely square edition with gatefold flaps. It is a beautiful magical realist coming of age story with gay content. I buy up copies whenever I find them to give away. His other adult novel, Crocodilia, was distributed briefly in the US, I believe, and therefore may be more readily available; I excerpted a section from it for my anthology The Mammoth Book of Gay Erotica.

Nancy Springer is a prolific author of adult genre titles and YA novels, although she has also published poetry titles, both for adults and children. But even within a genre, where the trend is toward endless series, she has recently written three stand-alone contemporary fantasy novels which each works to differently explode our conceptions of gender and sexuality: Larque on the Wing, Plumage, and Fair Peril. Eschewing a simple dichotomy of gay/straight, she wittily makes use of fantasy and myth to subvert preconceived notions.

Kosher Meat

Search for Lawrence Schimel's books on BookSense.com
(No worries here about shelving and classification!)

Lawrence Schimel is a prolific author and hard-working editor. His writing has appeared The Wall Street Journal, The Saturday Evening Post, The Boston Phoenix, Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, Physics Today, among others - and in more than 140 anthologies. His latest collection of short stories, His Tongue, will be published by North Atlantic Books/Frog Ltd. in August. He lives in Manhattan, NY, and Madrid, Spain.

Further Reading

George Saunders
Albert Goldbarth
Lambda Award Nominees
Lesbian Herstorical Fiction
Emma Donoghue
Lawrence Schimel's website

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