Fundamentals of Collection Development and Management, 2/e by Peggy Johnson
My rating: 4/5 cats
“a collection is an accumulation of past decisions” *
if you don’t see the beauty in that statement, you probably won’t give a shit about this book.
people on goodreads.com don’t seem to like this book very much. and i don’t know if it is just because it is a textbook, and who but a total nerd would love a textbook, or if it is a genuine dislike for the information or layout or whatever. me, i like it, and i feel like i learned a lot from this class, and this is the first semester of grad school where i feel like both my classes have practical applications that make me excited about the book business again.
now, i have been running the fiction department at my store for about 10 years, and a lot of the material in here is stuff i have been doing already, without any guidance. but it is important stuff, if you are going to take book-matters seriously. the book takes the concept of a collection as a whole: building, protecting, managing, tracking usage, discarding; and goes into very clear detail about all of these aspects. if you do care about having a solid collection, there is some really useful information here. there is a bunch of basic shit, too, that you will probably pick up as you go along in the field, like i did, but having it all together in one book as a reference tool is helpful.
and of course, everything i know, i know from a bookstore perspective. libraries are completely different, so the parts about budgets and administration and bulk orders through vendors is all stuff i don’t do now, but is stuff i will have to know about if i can ever bear to peel myself away from the job and the “collection” i have now. because i treat the section as though it is an living extension of me, and i always want it to look good and be healthy (i.e.—have more “good” books than “junk”) but at the same time, it has to be “productive” as i recently had to learn. it is a tale i would call “triumph of the will,” but that title has already been sullied.
if you have heard me bitching about this elsewhere, i apologize for repeating myself, but ima say it again here, because it is applicable and basically this book/class saved the day for books everywhere. or at least at my store.
and i will try to be brief.
basically, it comes down to the fact that i have had a pretty nice reign as fiction queen all these years. i am not the buyer, per se, but i have been able to get whatever i want into the store, because the buyer trusts me because i make a ton of money for the store—more than any fiction department in the country. so whether it is print on demand titles, or goodreads.com authors that no one is coming into the store specifically to find, or very small publishers or obscure world lit—i have been able to order it and trust that it will come in, and that i can make it sell through displays and whatnot. i also like to keep a stable of backlist higher-lit fiction that maybe doesn’t move as quickly as some of the other stuff, but is important for the prestige of the section, and the strength of the “collection.” (because i do view it as a collection—as an archive—as a representation of literature through the ages not as a place where people can come to buy books for the beach) so—i always have three copies of every robert coover book, 2 or 3 each of stanley elkin, john barth, harry mathews etc—even people i don’t like or haven’t read, but these “types” of post-moderny fiction writers that maybe aren’t as popular as they once were, but goldangit they should still be there.
so but now with nook and economy and our store having been “overextended” for years, they finally came knocking. and they handed me a list that was 44 pages long. (i know, because i have it right here—and that is just general fiction, not poetry, mystery, romance, westerns, sci-fi—those were separate lists) and they wanted me to return all of it, claiming they were books that hadn’t sold in a year—some of which we had been modeled for, but no longer were, and some (many) that were books i had brought in myself for the benefit of the book-buying world—like several of those coovers et.al. i like people to have options. people do not want options, they want twilight. so i tried to sweet talk, and got very practical, semi-sympathetic refusals. so there were tears and vomiting and general bad feelings. and i returned a lot of it—stuff i didn’t care about, but that still left me with a bunch of titles i could not bear to send back: dalkey and nyrb titles, hesperus and melville house. and i despaired and despaired and found a couple of loopholes (some titles hadn’t even been in the store for a year, so to me, they didn’t count as “deadstock,” and some had sold one or two copies which was enough to save them, technically.) but it was still bleak.
but then i got creative.
and i applied some tactics i learned in this class, and i was able to save many books just by displaying them with a “last chance” sign (and yes, i bought a bunch myself, as several of you goodreads.com book-recipients know, and other book-loving staff bought a bunch so there was some “cheating”) but the important part is that now they are saying i can keep whatever is left (and since the ones that sold, sold, i am going to order in more copies and use sales as a justification and i would like to see them try and stop me!
now they are saying, “yeah don’t return these, i guess you know best”
duh.
don’t tell me how to raise my child.
and that story was not intended to be just me patting myself on the back and saying how heroic i am, (although feel free to create a mythology—a lore—around me) it’s just illustrating that this shit matters. if you want to move books, in a library or a bookstore, people have to see them. i thought that names like barry unsworth and penelope fitzgerald would be enough for them to sell on their own, but i am learning that is no longer the case. frequently people get their book information from subway ads or what their friends are reading (and you goodreaders are of course major exceptions, because you mostly are aware of a range of books) but the public—they need to know their options and you can do that by highlighting the collection however you can.
if you are going to be in this business, this is important shit. it is not always going to be fun shit, but you gotta learn it. collection development policies, censorship issues, tailoring the collection to the community, deselection (shudder)—it’s all part of the world of books, and it does matter.
i kind of regret that i only rented this book from chegg. i knew i was going to want to keep my r/a textbooks, but i rented the ones for this class, and now i kind of want this one back. (i do not want the digital licensing book back, though)
oh, and sorry for all the ranting/rambling. i have this passion for books, see…
*that is not a quote from the book, that is from my professor, dr. chelton.
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