Bookstores - A Blogpost

I was at one of my two favorite bookstores last night - this one is a two-story Borders w/couches and chairs and all sorts of stuff on everything and you can have a coffee and sit up on the top floor and people watch - and was walking through the fiction section looking and hundreds and thousands of books I'll never read. These days you can find some rather interesting things on the covers of books. A couple of the more notables are a daisy of naked humans, butts up, in the middle of a field, as well as an extreme close-up of this girl's pink bra where the cups connect in the middle (is there a name for that?). And yes, this was the normal fiction section...not erotica or anything like that. In any case, besides...well, interesting photos, I noticed that many of the novels identified themselves by putting "A Novel" somewhere on the front cover.

This perplexes me. When you look at various classic literature, both ancient and more recent, the individual works don't identify their respective genres on the covers. Rather, they assume the reader is intelligent enough to figure it out on their own. Why is it, then, that authors/publishers/whoever feel the need to set apart their novels? Are readers dumber now (they probably are in some ways, but it's more of a rhetorical question)? Are the lines between poetry, reference text, and novels blurring?

Meh, whatever. If I get something published I guess I can do whatever I want with it. Until then, I'll assume you know what the heck you're reading (save for this post).

And for what it's worth, strange book covers aside, last night was probably the most enjoyable visit to a bookstore I've ever had.