Built bookshelves for the BookMark all day yesterday. And excavated the piles of boxes of books that had accumulated in the back room. I love doing that. 80% of it is the same stuff we already have, but there is that 20% that are prizes, something new, something interesting. Something that probably very few bookstores currently have, even big ones like Powell's.

(Read this to Linda...her comment: "I built the bookcases." O.K. Well, I helped put the books away. err....the fun part.)

I think it's the unusual, the quirky books that gives a store its distinction. In a sense, even though the two stores have very different approaches and strategies, both the BookMark and Pegasus have ended up reflecting me and Linda's impulse to try to make them interesting. I'm absolutely delighted to find a book called Weather, for instance, that is....about weather zones. We call a lot of these books "wall books" because they don't fit any particular category and are displayed on the wall.

One thing that has absolutely amazed me, is the sheer number of titles that have been produced in the last 50 years in the U.S. The idea that most books never will come through the door, and a huge number will only come in once. Every box seems to have a couple of prizes. One of my little battles with Linda and Kent is to make them look beyond initial 'this is old and beat up' reaction, to look closer at the author and subject matter. For instance, to get a 1958 book on Navigation. Too cool. Or a beat up copy of a Pearl S. Buck book. The classics just keep on selling, the Hemingway's, Fitzgerald's, but also lesser known classics, like Stendhal or Thomas Hardy.

These are books that make a store unique, that make it worth visiting. It took time, but after 4.5 years we've got a nice selection of unusual books.

I've also been fascinated by the morphing of the categories. We started with some fairly loose categories, which seemed to work very well. Mysteries, S.F. and Fantasy, Romance, Westerns, and Horror -- these were fairly obvious.

Fiction was interesting. Linda didn't really like the old, beat up copies of fiction, she felt they made the newer fiction look tacky, too. I, on the other hand, thought they were important. We reached a compromised that turned out to be exactly the right thing to do. We have the newer fiction facing the door, and then on the back side we have what we call 'Vintage' fiction.

Over time, the Mystery section and the S.F. sections got bigger, the Fiction section got bigger. We separated out Poetry books and Literary Non-fiction. Memoirs got separated from Autobiography/ Biography (roughly speaking, autobiographies tend to be by famous people, and Memoirs are more thematic.) We separated out 'Historical' fiction. Christian fiction became a big seller.

Linda has insisted on a World Religion section that has been hard to fill, next to the Christian section which is always overflowing. She sometimes gets remarks like, why do you have this section?....as if only Christianity counts.

We eventually settled on a Planes, Trains, Boats and Automobiles bookcase.

We started with a Science bookcase, but we added a Philosophy category, and eventually a Sociology/Anthropology section. We eventually divided out an Environment section from our Camping, Hunting, and Outdoor section. And we have two whole shelves of 'Sex' books. (err....not porn.....)

We created a West section, as distinct from Westerns, and this includes local, Oregon, and frontier material.

Our Cold Weather (mountain climbing, arctic exploration) became an Adventure category.

We created a Foreign Language shelf.

There is a Sport category and a Political category.

There is the Arts and Entertainment division, the Reference, (just about anything informational), Gardening (a nice selection), Cooking (a nice selection), Humor, Education (home schooling), and Home Improvement and Decorating.

We have a never ending supply of books that tell you how to get magically thin and healthy (Diet and Health) , that tell you how the magically get rich (Business), or magically emotionally, mentally, or spiritually well adjusted (Psychology, Self-Help, and Metaphysical).

Since mankind has never been particularly Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise...these categories will always thrive.

We eventually gave Pregnancy and Baby books their own shelf.

History books are an important part of the store, and we are always looking for more good history books. Anyone reading this? Bring in History books.....(for credit of course....)

Travel books and Animal books. We have a final, kind of everything else bookcase -- crafts, antiques, Christmas, quilting, guides, etc. etc.

And of course the audio books. We have a 3.00 Bookclub books section, and a 1.00 Hdc and .50 pbk Knockabout books.

I think that is about every category. We try to fit everything into one of them, though it can sometimes be difficult to categorize a book.

Oh....and Children's and Young Adult!!! (Linda reminded me....) And coffee table books, and her orphan red-headed stepchildren books on a trolley. We sell a huge number of books off our New Books table. And a kind of Nostalgia section behind the counter of old books.

I tried to do a mental visit to the store, and I still missed stuff, so no doubt I still left a couple of categories out. Here I was going to brag about how we distilled books into a few categories, and then the list seems endless.

Anyway, if you haven't been into the BookMark lately, you might give us another visit. We're constantly getting new books, constantly increasing the variety, if I do say so myself.