Hania needed to buy a card and since Jezebel and Grand Central Stationery are closed on Sunday we went to Barnes & Noble. As she searched, I wandered over to the Travel section and found two paperback copies of The Joys of Travel, which the store had not carried for months. They were easy to find because they had been shelved with the cover facing outwards. Also, since the store carries so few travel essays and narratives, books by authors whose names begin with S are at gut rather than ankle level.
Back home I read an article in the New York Times Business section about the new chief executive of Barnes & Noble, James Daunt. He is a Brit whose first bookstore was a travel bookstore, or at least a store where books were organized according to country. (Not sure where that would have left The Joys of Travel.) As head of Waterstone’s, Britain’s largest chain bookstore, he had given store managers tremendous autonomy, allowing them to order and display the books that they thought their customers would want, a selection that included, one would think, books by local authors. I wasn’t sure if Daunt's philosophy was already in effect at B&N, or if the employees of the Ft. Lauderdale store were proactively responding to it. Or if the appearance of my book was just a fluke. This last scenario is the most appealing for it would seem to suggest a nationwide fluke.
