The View From Barnes & Noble

So, for Christmas, my sister-in-law gave my husband and me each a $25 gift card to Barnes & Noble. I haven't been a habitual Barnes & Noble shopper since . . . well, actually, I'm not sure I've ever been a habitual Barnes & Noble shopper, now that I think about it. Whenever I go into any of the large bookstore chains -- and we're talking about, like, in the last 20 years or so -- I find myself unable to find anything to be interested in. Not that I don't sometimes buy things anyway; it's just that when I do, odds are that I've grabbed it more or less at random because I want to get out of the store, and I have no idea if it's a book I'm going to like. Often, it turns out that I don't, and then I feel bad for wasting the money on a book I don't like, which is why I'm not in the habit of shopping at Barnes & Noble.¹

The point being that it'd been a long time since I was in a position to check out the gardening section of a large bookstore, and, as there has been some recent talk about book-writing, I figured this would be an excellent chance to check out the situation on the ground, as it were.

And the situation on the ground is this:




Ten shelves of gardening books, each roughly three or four feet long (0.9-1.2 m). So go ahead, open 'em in a separate tab and find the indoor plant books. I'll wait.

No, really. There are two in there. Take your time.

Give up?


The shelves in the other photo have none at all.

To make this all slightly worse, the book on the lower shelf, The Indoor Plant Bible, is spiral-bound. It doesn't look like it in the photo, because there's like a plastic spine attached to the loops to make it look more substantial, but if you open it up, the pages are threaded onto wire loops. It's heavier paper stock than usual, but still -- how long is something like that really going to last a person?

The other book, The Complete Houseplant Survival Manual, is better, or at least isn't constructed so as to fall apart the tenth time you pick it up, but still. Only two houseplant books. (And I actually didn't realize The Complete Houseplant Survival Manual was there until I got home and was looking through the photos.)² Even the people who want to grow marijuana have more options on the Barnes & Noble bookshelves, by like, a 2-to-1 margin. (Which, hey, I'm not judging, and I recognize that however illegal growing marijuana might be in the state of Iowa, reading a book about growing marijuana is still legal. I am nevertheless still surprised at the amount of shelf space devoted to an activity no customer could legally do.)

There are two basic emotional responses an aspiring writer of houseplant books can have to a situation like this, and I have been having both of them. The glass-half-empty response is to conclude that Barnes & Noble doesn't believe that books about houseplants sell well enough to devote any shelf space to them, which goes along with what I've been told elsewhere. The glass-half-full response is to notice the almost total lack of competition and conclude that if I could just get a book published, I could have the whole topic almost completely to myself. My brain has synthesized the two responses into the uninspiring conclusion that if I tried really hard and approached the right people in the right ways, over a long enough period of time, I could totally be the biggest, most important authority on a topic about which nobody gives a shit. Which is sort of how I've felt in the garden-blogging community already, so I suppose I could get used to it easily enough.

As for the gift card, I did wind up buying something plant-related from these shelves, though doing so also required the husband's card.³ I'll review it relatively soon (the tentative plan is to post it on 26 January), but I'm not going to tell you which book right now.

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¹ One of the stranger examples of this is Off Camera: Private Thoughts Made Public, Ted Koppel's memoir. In hardback, no less. I read it once, have no memory of anything in it, and have packed and unpacked it through three moves now even though I know I have no interest in reading it again. But it seemed like a good idea in the store, apparently.
Nothing against Ted Koppel, by the way. He seems like a decent enough guy.
² It's also probably true that the two (?) books on orchids are primarily written to people who are trying to grow them indoors, and therefore sort of qualify as houseplant books. Likewise, some of the container-gardening and herb-gardening books (So many herb-gardening books! Whyyyyyyy?) probably at least address overwintering plants in the house, if not growing them indoors year-round, and as such might almost count as houseplant books. There are also a couple books about succulents, which it's not clear just from looking at the books' spines whether they might cover indoor culture or not, but one might give the benefit of the doubt and say that those could also qualify as houseplant books, On the other hand, looking at books about orchids, container gardening, herb gardening, or succulents is not going to help you if you have questions about why your peace lily is going black at the leaf tips,^a so those other books only count for just so much.
     ^a (It's too wet, most likely. You're welcome.)
³ (He volunteered his card before we even left the house, so it's not like I was preventing him from getting something he really wanted, just FYI.)