Originally published at: Author Michael Chabon recreates the Science Fiction section from the bookstore of his youth | Boing Boing
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Not quite old enough to remember shelves stocked like that in the bookstore, but they do look like my home shelves from a decade later.
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A dead-on match except for limitations he couldn’t control: In my day, Doc Savage books were printed as 2-in-ones (buying them digitally probably doesn’t work that way), and my local store always put Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy in the Sci-Fi section. (of course, they often put a variety of Fantasy books in there, too. Scholarly discipline was not their strongest suit, and I don’t know if a lot of these books even had a Dewey Decimal Number.)
I’m pretty sure that Ox, Orn, and Omnivore are on the shelf in reverse order.
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I also read the Star Wars novelization before several months before the movie opened. I was 14, and saw the first show at the Coronet Theatre in San Francisco on 5/25/77. It took me until seeing the movie to realize that Artoo Detoo and See Threepio were actually R2-D2 and C-3PO.
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Ooh, what memories. I haven’t thought about the Deryni series in forever. We didn’t have a great bookstore in town, so younger me had to work with what was at the library and yard sales (until I was old enough to ride the bus to the big mall down the road).
I read the novel first, too. Didn’t see the movie until my parents took me for my birthday late in '77.
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I wonder if we ever picked up the same book. If he wants to add the next few years of Piers Anthony books, he’s going to need to build an extension on his house.
Is Dewey for fiction (relatively) new? When I was growing up, non-fiction was Dewey, fiction was always alpha by author.
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I still have a box set of Blish Star Trek books from 1972. I’m pretty sure I had the ones for the animated series too at one point, but they seem to have gotten lost along the way.
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It’s like looking at my basement bookshelves, (I have at least 50% of those titles, and 20% of those exact covers. However, I do not have the spare shelve space to show the covers! I want to reread those again.
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No Perry Rhodan?
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I’m seething with jealously looking at this incredible library. Brilliant notion to face their covers out, it’s so completely rad!
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… kids have a weird faith that any information presented to them is important knowledge about the world that must be studied and memorized 
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I remember when the D&D books started showing up at the mainstream bookstore. I already had more books than I really needed, as I was loyal to the local gaming/scifi/comic shop, but it was cool to see. Felt like something fantastic had breached a portal into the mundane realm.
Made me happy to see a few “non-fiction” sci-books at the bottom like the Dune Encyclopedia. That was always my favorite sub-section of the bookstore (Star Trek Concordance, Technical Manual, Barlowe’s Guide to Extraterrestrials, etc).
Nah, it’s old. Dewey for Fiction is like LCC for Fiction-- organized by language and country. The only advantage is that the criticism is shelved nearby/
Nice to see plenty of Jack Vance, and a fair helping of Roger Zelazny.
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I remember and read a lot of those, especially all of the Clarke paperbacks. But he’s missing all of the best of the year anthologies.
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For decades I’ve been trying to remember the title and author of the fantasy series that I bought at the Page and Palette in Fairhope, AL as a kid in the 70s. Kept my fingers crossed that Chabon had included it in the image, and sure enough, there it was: Circle of Light, by Neil Hancock. Thanks, Mike!
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I’m so fired!
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