On the Bookstore**

So Andy took me to Fort Kinnaird on Sunday to visit the ‘big’ HMV/Waterstone’s outlet. It was an exercise in heartbreak and frustration although in the end I walked out with some good things. First off books only make up about a third of the floor space in a very roomy unit but considering that particular location is not solely dedicated as a book store that is pardonable. I headed straight for the SF/F section which was shamefully TINY. Four wall mounted units of SF/F titles, one wall unit of Paranormal Romance, one wall unit of ‘Dark’ Fantasy/Romance (aka twilight-esque train-wrecks) and one side of a free-standing floor unit of Horror titles. It was smaller than the SF/F Section in Waterstone’s Dundee, I was flabbergasted even though I should not have been.

I started looking for some of the newer titles that I felt should be easily available like Sam Sykes’s Tome of the Undergates or Black Halo. No copies. I found a single softback copy of City of Ruins by Mark Charan Newton but no copy of Nights of Villjamur. A lone hardback of The Wiseman’s Fear lingered on a bottom shelf but I already had that at home. I started to get irritable.

I flagged down a staff member to make an inquiry, just to see if I was maybe missing titles or a special display. No joy, neither that outlet nor the one at Ocean Terminal had copies of Nights of Villjamur but one of the branches on Princes’ Street did*, they had twenty copies (!) or they could order it in and the title might get there in seven to ten days. I grabbed the fraying ends of my temper tight and thanked the staff members politely, telling myself things like ‘It is not their fault, they aren’t in charge of ordering’ and ‘You know SF/F is a niche market and sometimes you can’t get what you want, when you want it’.

As I stood in that sliver of floor space and strained to find something I really wanted to read, thankfully, a copy of Horns by Joe Hill jumped out at me. Then, three more titles made themselves known in little flashes of interest as I remember bits from a couple of blogs I follow.

You might be scratching you head at this point or think that maybe I’m overdramatizing this experience but let me clarify one very salient point, I am dirt fucking poor right now. Buying books, even just 24£ of books, is a huge deal as that money could be put to better use in the petrol tank or putting cheap food on the table. Andy was trying to do something really nice for me and I NEEDED to make this work out as a positive so that he understood how grateful I am; not just for that day’s purchase but that he tolerates my addiction and at least tries to understand the world I live in most of the time.

When he circled back out of DVDs to check on my progress, I was still pretty frustrated but ready to go. I remember telling him how frustrated I was that everything I consider entertaining tends to be labelled as ‘trashy’, ‘ghetto’ or ‘a waste of time and resources’. He is well aware of how I feel about the publishing industry’s saturation with widely accepted, mass marketed Lit-Fic; shit that I’ve been encouraged to lap up, gestate and re-birth/ reproduce especially since I have a Lit degree that is somehow magically supposed to impart good taste and the ability to excrete the high brow equivelent of literary gold at a whim. It might be frustrating and much more discouraging than the usual course of things in publishing but I’d rather keep slumming, thanks.

*Due to the Edinburgh Trams project (which is a whole different flavour of government fuck up) getting to shops on Princes Street is a right laugh, especially on the weekend. It would probably be safer and more productive to book a cruise that ends in R'lyeh.

**This was originally posted to my tumblr on the 30th of May.