Tonight Mrs. TANBI and I went to the BN at the waterfront for some retail hiking - it was nasty outside. While I was looking around I saw something that lead me to the inescapable conclusion that the people at BN must be Scientologists.
The Science Fiction section of the store is and always has been alpha by author. This is something that as a shopper you get used to, and I will admit to feeling a certain reassurance from being able to see the copies of Flatland and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy that have resided in the upper left corner of the shelf for quite some time now. Next to this there is always one bank of shelves with new releases, both hard and soft cover editions of things new to the market. Often I look at this shelf thinking "gee, I read that six months ago, I wonder when they will move it." Occasionally I guess there are some surprises on the new release shelf. The one's I can think of recently would be LOTR and Narnia books, maybe A Scanner Darkly. This is a case where an old book gets a film or a TV show and so they move it out front for a while.
But can anyone explain to me why Battlefield Earth is the first selection on the BN Science Fiction shelf?
Not "L" nor "Ron" nor "Hubbard" begin with the letter A as far as I can tell, and for that matter neither do "Battlefield" or "Earth." There has never, to my knowledge, been a Battlefield Earth TV show. A quick check of IMDB shows that the Forest Whittaker, John Travolta BE movie came out seven years ago - long for even the most slothful bookstore man-animal to leave a book out of position. Looking at Amazon seems to suggest that the last printing of the book was 2001. I am at a loss.
Leading me to the only conclusion that seems possible. BN is very possibly a front for Scientology. I don't see any other plausible reasoning, and the rule is when you've eliminated all of the reasonable possibilities then the unreasonable must be the truth (or something like that).
I guess I will have to check some other BN's to be sure. I don't want to upset BN unnecessarily, and conversely there's the possibility that the Scientology people might hate BN and be upset too. So for the time being let's just call this a hypothesis in need of further research.
It would be very strange though.
Wednesday, January 24, 2007
BN, Scientologists?
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1 comment:
It has long been speculated that the reason DIANETICS remains such a high ranking seller is that CoS members continue to buy multiple copies to keep it there. Supposedly, these copies are then collected and "resold" to merchants where the cycle continues. I suspect that moving El-Ron's books to a higher profile place on the shelves might be part of that same agenda.
Have you ever read one of his books? They actually don't sound that much different than DIANETICS...
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