"An Intellectual Snob"

"That's the worst kind of snob you can be, an intellectual snob." -The Philadelphia Story

All right, allow me to be a snob for a minute. You don't mind, right? Good.

I shop and Barnes and Noble. Why? Because there's no other bookstore for 14 miles, that's why. Were I nearer Salt Lake, I might try out Borders, I've heard it's good. I wish the tiny library near my house had a larger selection...but they don't. I wish Weber State's library had more fiction...but they don't. I wish I didn't have to pay shipping on books I want from Amazon...but I do. So I suck it up and shop at Barnes and Noble, but every time I go inside, the sole reason I am still their customer is that they are they only book store that won't cost me $5 in gas to get to. And even then, it's a smaller Barnes and Noble, minus the Starbucks and nifty kid's corner.

But WHY does b&n bug me so much?

To begin with, their amorphous system of categorizing books has always baffled me, and I can't rely on previous experience to find something again, because they always CHANGE this categorization. I went in looking for 'On the Origin of Species' one day, on the off-chance that I might finally read the thing. I looked under science, I looked under history, I looked under non-fiction (whatever that means), and still couldn't find it. When I asked, I was shown that the only copy they had was an enormous hard-back, large print, commemorative edition...on the shelf opposite the GRE and LSAT prep books. Oh-kay. Last weekend when I was in (and utterly astonished to find they had what I wanted), I noticed that the largest section was currently labeled 'fiction and literature.' For a place such as B&N, surely simply 'literature' or 'fiction' would suffice. And whilst in this section, looking for what I assumed would simply be a 'fiction' book, I discovered a separate section called 'mystery,' under which my action-adventure I wanted was filed. Whatever.

Also (and this is nit-picky, I'll admit it), their website's search engine is not case-sensitive. At all. In fact, it takes my carefully typed in 'As You Like It,' and demotes it to 'as you like it.' WHAT?!? You would HOPE that a BOOK website, from a prominent book seller, where I'm sure a lot of the founding people liked LITERATURE, could get their case right!

Also, their stores have a conflicted personality. They try very hard to put on an air of academia, but it's always confused with alternate personalities urging them to make their stores into cafes, or cater only to the young vampire and werewolf obsessed teenagers (who wouldn't come into the store anyway, they will ask their parents to pick up the book), or sell the nook faster than Amazon can sell its Kindles.

...and they still never have the books I want. Granted, my tastes are obscure, random, and often esoteric to the point that I can more easily find interesting literature in a dusty corner of a professor's office. And yet, being that Barnes and Noble seems to be one of the two major players in the bookstore industry, I'd have thought that I could get a little more out of them. Forgive me for not wanting to purchase 'The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest,' the latest self help book, or, heaven forbid, 'Twilight.' I'd really rather like it if you had a decent anthropology section. Or history section. Or classics section. Or at least have all the Star Trek Voyager books available in the warehouse. But they don't.