Facing Off With Face Outs

My sister remains endlessly fascinated by bookstore "face outs," those books that sit literally faced out on the shelf with the cover showing. On at least a half a dozen occasions, she has implored with a tone of fascination, "How do you decide which ones to face out?" I am not quite sure why this intrigues her so much, but I think that it has something to do with the fact that she recognizes that face out books have an opportunity to advertise themselves more to customers: people really do get to judge these books by their cover.

There are two answers to her question. One is extremely boring and fairly obvious. Face outs tend to be books with multiple copies. Multiple copies suggest that it must be recent and/or somewhat popular. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that facing out these types of titles could be financially advantageous. So we face the books out and hope that people recognize the covers and consequently, want to buy them.

The second answer is infinitely more interesting: personal bias. For instance, from about 2AM to 4AM this morning, I shifted around the entire Parenting section. I am not especially fond of this section, seeing as infant care and the intimate details of what to expect if I'm expecting are just about as interesting to me as the entirety of the Religion section. It's not a section that I actively avoid, but to me, it's pretty boring. I'd rather be off in Art or Sociology or Cooking or Literary Criticism.

Nevertheless, I had to rearrange the section, so I did it. At this point, imagine me rubbing my hands together and demonically grinning. Why? Face outs. I had the opportunity to push my own agenda, which in the middle of the night, thrilled me to no end. And thus, I chose to face out books that I thought were a) bizarre (like Spiritual Midwifery) or b) worthwhile considerations for the generally red crowd of Central PA (like The Ultimate Guide to Pregnancy for Lesbians).

Sometimes, you get really lucky and you'll do an entire shelf of face outs, which basically means that you're trying to take up shelf space. So it's up to you to curate a little display of five or six titles that have a common theme. As for me, I made one about the role of fathers in pregnancy/child rearing, the importance of play (half because I wanted to push the title Last Child in the Woods, a book about how kids don't play outside enough), and bullying. In other words, if I would want to read anything in the Parenting section, those are the types of things that I would pick.

But it won't last for very long. With my luck, by the time I go back to work at 6PM this evening, someone will have turned over The Ultimate Guide to Pregnancy for Lesbians and hidden The Sex Pop Up Book behind the children's play face out shelf.