Barnes and Noble

I was a bit surprised to see a Barnes and Noble on the least of possible streams. It just seemed out of place, to have a chain store amongst all the smaller, family owned businesses. This distinction, of course, meant I had to visit it.

That's the biggest book store I've ever seen.

Looks are certainly deceiving. While it appears to be six floors from the outside, only four of them were actually available for public access. Escalators in the store allowed one to get a great view of the entire floor they were on. I've experienced Barnes and Noble stores before, but none on quite this scale.

The first floor featured books. Lots and lots of books. It hit all the typical expectations with just about every genre one could think of, many different book series aimed at different audiences, old books, recent books, books for children, adults, teens, men, women, and whoever else would want a book. It certainly seemed more commercial than the other book stores I've written about. Books were all laid out in a fashion that really seemed like they were trying to be old. They were arranged on round tables and long rectangular tables in such a way that I felt drawn to just picking one up and opening it. Perhaps its just me, but I don't feel quite the same way with books placed on a shelf. Something about books being on a shelf makes them look like an exhibit at a museum to me. Being out on a table is just more appealing, more approachable. I think its the comparative lack of order. Books on a shelf are very uniform, and don't look like they want to be disturbed, whereas the ones on tables just look more like books that want to be read. Am I reading too deeply into this? Probably.

The second floor featured a small cafe, serving typical cafe food. I'd have taken more pictures, but an employee requested I not do that. Throughout the rest of the second floor were more books, and I noticed right away that the ones nearest to the cafe were cook books. That wasn't an accident. Clearly, someone at Barnes and Noble knew how to market books, and I'm convinced that the books on the table were a result of the same thing!

The third floor is what really threw me off. On this floor were... toys? Not books, and I had expected. There were some books, but they really took a backseat to the toys. A large number of the toys were of the LEGO brand, a personal favorite of mine throughout elementary school. I also noticed that some were from the Thomas the Tank Engine franchise, which I was in love with before school started. Interestingly, both these toy brands were out for children to play with on tables, and both have one major theme in common: creativity. LEGO, by nature, promotes creative thinking, as it is merely plastic bricks that a child can arrange into a house, or a spaceship, or a racecar, or whatever else they can imagine. I've seen some beautiful, life-sized sculptures made of nothing but LEGO. Meanwhile, Thomas the Tank Engine holds a similar play philosophy. I don't believe it's as obvious about it, but the little plastic trains (that were made of wood back when I used to play with them) are designed to be pushed on little plastic railroads. These railroads are not prebuilt, however, and have to be assembled by the child playing with them. In a way much like LEGO, they require a child to think for themselves about how they want to play, and don't make kids follow any specific rules. I can see why a book store would want to promote thinking like that, and would even attribute both to why I'm a creative thinker today.

The fourth floor featured media outside of books. There were shelves after shelves of movies and TV shows, all on DVD. I searched around for a few, and was actually surprised to see some lesser known ones there. Now, I'm well versed enough in obscure films to have known a few they couldn't possibly have had (such as Tentacoolino, the sequel to the lesser known of the two animated knockoffs of Titanic), but it was still pleasing to see some films there that I figured no one else had ever heard of. Nearby, they had CDs and albums lining more shelves, with such a great variety in genre and artist.

There was only one thing that I found to be missing, and that's video games. I realize there's still a very negative stigma surrounding video games and those who play them, but I found it kind of sad that I could find such mindless crap as The Last Song in the DVD section, and yet the only mention of video games I found were a few statues of Nintendo characters on display down at the toy section. Video games are such a unique and complex method of storytelling, and seeing them left out of the electronic media section was disheartening to say the least. But, I shalln't dwell upon this here, because I think I can cover this in great detail in a future blog post...