Apologies, but I've been travelling with family in joyous celebration of good things this past week, and thus, have not been blogging. This should be the last major interruption in the foreseeable future. Now, a few notes on my trip:
I got to see a Barnes and Noble Bookstore, which is the American Equivalent to Chapters. A few interesting notes:
- Like Chapters, B&N stores have a built-in Starbucks. Unlike Chapters, you serve massive amounts of ice cream in the Starbucks, whereas Chapters has a variety of coffee flavours unknown to other beings and chains.
- Where Chapters is vastly superior: A larger and wider array of non-fiction books, particularly those about history, politics and cultures other than the US.
- Where Chapters is vastly inferior: B&N Science-fiction and Fantasy sections dwarf those of Chapters. Also, B&N have a larger selection of the classics (i.e. Heinlein, E.E. Smith, Verne, Wells) than is normally available through Chapters.
- The comic shelves: Let me make this clear- MANGA IS SUPREME HERE. There were four shelves of the stuff, all of uniform shape; all the volumes perfectly ordered so there was no question where each series was, and easy to find what you were looking for. The superhero stuff was about two shelves, with no possible order, and they were lumped in with the RPG books and the "unofficial guides" to whatever comic/sci-fi/TV adaptation movies were hot the last couple years. If I were a Marvel/DC/Dark Horse/Image guy and went by these shelves, I would start thinking that I was in serious trouble. And by "Serious Trouble", I mean, the kind Detroit Automakers saw in 1988, when they saw that the Japanese were about to descend upon them like bloodthirsty hawks, and that they had no idea what to do.
Anyway, I had a really good time, and I'm glad to be back. More will be coming soon.
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