There was a blissful time in history when, going into a bookstore, one was presented with a wealth of options for a given genre. Let’s take Romance. I could explore the Romance area and select from adored regency romances like Pride & Prejudice. I could choose intriguing novels set in the 1950s/1960s UK by Mary Stewart. And yes I could read modern-era novels in their far wider range of ethnic background, sexual orientation, elderly romance, and more.
I was surprised to find, on a recent trip to a bookstore, that at least this one now seems to focus only on items which were just released recently. They didn’t offer older content. Most surprisingly, they didn’t have JANE AUSTEN in their Romance area.
Let’s take a look.
The middle three shelves here are romance. On the first top left shelf, facing forward, you can see Dream Chaser by Kristen Ashley. Then five books later is Her Unexpected Match by Lacey Baker. I think we all agree that Jane Austen should be in Romance and at least Pride and Prejudice should be in between these two.
It appears to me that they have ejected ALL non-current Romance books to a “classics” area. So Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, Romeo and Juliet, Wuthering Heights, Tess of the D’Urbervilles … they are all next to DRACULA and FRANKENSTEIN. You can’t find them organically in Romance at all.
That bothers me immensely. It’s like Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, and the others aren’t worthy of reading in the genre on their own merit. They are “not interesting” as romance novels. They are only interesting if you’re taking some sort of a course on ancient literature that ancient people read and want to take notes for an upcoming class.
I say this of course as someone who ADORES Pride & Prejudice, Sense & Sensibility, Jane Eyre, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, and so on. I think these are great books to read and enjoy. To wholly separate them out into an entirely different area alongside Dracula and Frankenstein, and to say that romance readers need to KNOW the books exist and where they might be found in order to discover them, feels very wrong to me. These books should be in with Romance so that romance readers happen across them, just as they do other romance novels.
This separation also means that all of the fantastic “not from pre-1920” books are completely lost and missing. On this Classics shelf, I think the newest book shown is The Secret Garden from 1911. So where are all the other amazing books which were published between 1911 and let’s say 2010? I would be interested in going through their “real” Romance area and seeing what the oldest book they have in that area is. I would guess it’s somewhere around 2010. Readers are getting an extremely skewed idea of what the genre has to offer.
I realize that bookstores can’t stock every single book ever published. But there’s got to be some sort of a middle ground where they present a range of options, rather than just what the big publishers are pushing at this very nanosecond … plus a few ‘ancient literature’ in case someone has a school assignment …