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5:36 am
April 9, 2011
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I have a question that I’ve been meaning to ask for a while, and shopping aimlessly today reminded me of the question. Just what constitutes a book as a Biography?
How this question arose was that in my opinion a biography is the story of a person who isn’t the author. I find myself gravitating to the Biography section of a book shop standing looking hoping for some new book on a Tudor personality but I never see any, so I then gravitate over to the History section and what did I see today a book on Queen Anne (which I already purchased prior to today). Now I personally would have that book sitting in the biography section as it is a book about Queen Anne’s life, but I’m beginning to think in a bookshop Biography means books on living famous people or dead celebrities.
To use various books of Weir’s that I have as to demonstrate my thinking if I were to own a book shop. I would place her books The Princes Of The Towers, The Six Wives Of Henry VII and Children of England into the history section. But I would then place her books Elizabeth the Queen and Mary Boleyn into the Biography section. Is this thinking technically wrong.
Of course, if I actually owned a bookshop, I would keep it more simple and just have generic non-fiction and the books placed in author’s surname alphabetically so all of Weir’s books would be together.
And to finish with a laugh, while standing in the book section I came across the paperback version of all of Phillipa Gregory’s Cousins Wars novel. And sitting right next to them was her non-fiction book on the Cousins Wars. I’m wondering if this is some sort of statement from the shelf stacker? Sadly, though I think it is just a clueless person.
7:11 am
June 15, 2012
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Personally, I would put all of Weir’s books in the fiction section…
11:37 am
December 5, 2009
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Gill said
Personally, I would put all of Weir’s books in the fiction section…
I have thought about this long and hard, and feel that we may have all misjudged Ms Weir. I have come to believe that she is the worlds greatest spoofer. She clearly has a highly defined sense of irony, satire and the ridiculous, all of which are needed in order to have fooled the public with her spoofs for so long. She is an undiscovered comic genius!
3:37 pm
February 24, 2012
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To me, a biography is a book about a person’s life, that someone else wrote. A history book is more about the time in history and the events that took place.
If I owned a bookshop it would be nothing but Tudor…and I’d be broke from buying all my stock.
4:03 pm
October 28, 2011
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Louise said
I have thought about this long and hard, and feel that we may have all misjudged Ms Weir. I have come to believe that she is the worlds greatest spoofer. She clearly has a highly defined sense of irony, satire and the ridiculous, all of which are needed in order to have fooled the public with her spoofs for so long. She is an undiscovered comic genius!
Bill for browsing “continuity” I used to mix some biographies into other sections when we had a bricks & mortar store. I’d keep biographies of historical figures in history, sometimes I’d pop author biographies, like Arthur Miller, for example on display above the classics. The general biographies had their own section, but sports bios went with sports books. “True stories” as they are called, which is basically a spin-off of true crime but centred on people surviving child abuse, cults etc went over with true crime, because true crime readers will generally read those sorts of biographies as well.
Art bios with art books etc. It’s a bit tricky, but usually a customer who is interested in general history of a period may want to read more on a particular figure and it saves having to travel over to a different section. Does that make sense?
8:47 am
April 9, 2011
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Ah Olga, your book shop makes much more sense then all the ones i’ve strolled on into. I’m beginning to think the Biography section of a bookstore should just be scrapped. Cause let’s be honest, if you are looking for a biography the best place to look would be in the category that person belongs to. Instead of having to skim through all those unofficial biographies on all those flash in the pans or recently dead people.
