Friday, November 07, 2003
I'm back at The Greenhouse today, outside it's chilly but inside it's so warm we're having to open windows and are seriously considering turning the fan on. Hence the name. I seem to have been doing little more than stock weeding this week. On Tuesday I was here and finished my weeding of the non-fiction, yesterday I was at The Cube and weeded their large print books (and it seems only recently that publishers have considered the idea of making their large print books still look visually attractive, I was pulling books off from the mid-nineties with horrible basic design schemes and the appearance of something from the 1960s. These are books for people with reduced sight, not the blind!), now I'm back at The Greenhouse and pulling out fiction. Fiction weeding can be quite difficult to do. On the whole, non-fiction you can pull off if it hasn't been without within, say, a year, because in a public library if it hasn't been out for a year it might well never go out again and the information in it will be out of date. Travel books, depending on when you're weeding them, might be okay if they're a year old but much older than that and it's time for them to go, even if they're still going out, because the information is out of date (I remember doing a travel book buy a few years back when there was an earthquake in South America, pos. Colombia? Anyway, the next day I went int to work and crossed the Colombia Rough Guides, Lonely Planets etc off the list as I knew the information was now out of date by default).
Fiction is a bit different. It doesn't really go out of date, just people's attitudes (such as with Noddy and his Gollies). I find it a bit more difficult to do as you have to try and judge books on the grounds of 'no, it hasn't gone out this year but could it become popular again? Is this the kind of author for whom there might be a sudden resurge in interest?' and I hate having to make those calls. So I've probably pulled some stuff off which I could have left on, but if you take that attitude you'd never weed anything.
Fiction is a bit different. It doesn't really go out of date, just people's attitudes (such as with Noddy and his Gollies). I find it a bit more difficult to do as you have to try and judge books on the grounds of 'no, it hasn't gone out this year but could it become popular again? Is this the kind of author for whom there might be a sudden resurge in interest?' and I hate having to make those calls. So I've probably pulled some stuff off which I could have left on, but if you take that attitude you'd never weed anything.
