If you go into any big-box bookstore these days, you’ll find a huge section of manga titles (that is, Japanese comic books), including dozens of different series, many of them running to a dozen or more volumes. This section is always impeccably organized, with all the series grouped neatly together, and the overall section alphabetical by series.<\/p>\n
Right next to that, there will be a considerably smaller section of “graphic novels” (that is, Western comic books). The shelving for this section always appears to have been done by poorly trained chimpanzees. They rarely even mange to have books from the same series next to one another, and there’s no detectable pattern to the way the books are placed on the shelves. Are they sorted by author? By publisher? By ISBN? Nobody knows.<\/p>\n
Why is that? Do they use special ink for Japanese comic books that makes people orderly and law-abiding? Do they soak graphic novel paper in LSD? Why is it that I can tell at a glance whether they have volume 57 of Dragon Ball Z<\/cite>, but can never be sure that they don’t have a copy of the next volume of Lucifer<\/cite> hiding somewhere in the jumble of X-Men relaunches?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" If you go into any big-box bookstore these days, you’ll find a huge section of manga titles (that is, Japanese comic books), including dozens of different series, many of them running to a dozen or more volumes. This section is always impeccably organized, with all the series grouped neatly together, and the overall section alphabetical… Continue reading Bookstore Conundrum<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-823","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/823","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=823"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/823\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=823"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=823"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=823"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}