Stopping the Mad Bookstore Misshelver

An article in a blog titled "Biologists Helping Bookstores" says,
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Barnes & Noble in the cultural wastela-, er, heartland of Irvine. I drop by the lone bookstore in the huge outdoor mall, The Spectrum. Bracing myself, I approach the science section.

The science section is tiny, only two small aisles three shelves high, but it doesn't take long to come across a miscategorized book - and it wasn't what I expected. God is not Great by the celebrity atheist Christopher Hitchens.

Seeing as my aim is to re-shelve religion and/or philosophy books to the correct part of the store, I am duty-bound to act. This is a book on atheism from a non-scientist, and it simply does not belong in the science section. Science is a secular process and has nothing to do with the question of the existence, or the non-existence, of a God. It is thus relocated to the Philosophy shelves upstairs. "But what about Dawkins?!" I hear you cry. Dawkins is another well-known atheist, I agree, but he is best known as an evolutionary biologist and his books are strongly evolution-themed.

Let's see what else we can find.

I think I might have picked a bad week to start this quest. Behe's new book must have been just released: Four copies of The Edge of Evolution were discovered once more in the science section.

I flip a copy and read the back. Here's the beginning of the first quote from the back cover: "Until the past decade and the genomics revolution, Darwin's theory rested on indirect evidence and reasonable speculation..." (Dr. Philip Skell, Evan Pugh Professor of Chemistry, Emeritus, at Pennsylvania State University, and member of the National Academy of Sciences). That's not true! I am emboldened by this bare-faced lie from this well-respected elderly chemist, pick up all four copies, and stroll upstairs.

Now, I aim for accuracy in my recategorization, and I was still slightly mad at the lies on the back cover (read the "Editorial Reviews" at Amazon for a sampling), so I sought out the most appropriate section of the store: Behe's lie-covered volume now rightly resides in the Religious Fiction section . . . . A job well done.

A comment in the article's comment thread says,

Moving books to another section of the store is not "helping" or "making a statement"; it is making a mess. It makes finding a book much harder for the employee who has looked it up in the computer because it's not where it's supposed to be. It means the possibility of a lost sale because the book cannot be found, at least for the moment.

It not only could mean a lost sale, but could also mean a lost customer. One of the main reasons why people still buy books at bookstores instead of buying books online is that books can be thoroughly examined before purchase at a bookstore.

This stupid fathead is going to start a misshelving war, with Darwinist books being reshelved in other sections. Two can play this game.

BVD-clad blogger Sleazy PZ Myers of course heartily approves of this misshelving -- he says, "I thought we all did this. You mean most people don't?" Several commenters on his blog -- including a bookstore employee -- brag or boast that they have done this misshelving themselves. Some of these vandals have also misshelved books in libraries.

The greedy Darwinists are not satisfied with their little "victory" of getting Of Pandas and People "removed" from Dover classrooms (of course, as we know, the book wasn't really "banned," because Wickedpedia and the American Library Association refused to put it in "banned book" lists).

One way for the bookstores to put an end to this nonsense is to put the misshelved books in the best-seller sections or other special displays.
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