In its debut issue, Seattle Metropolitan magazine announced
that “It takes a village—University Village—to marry
hunting and gathering with sophistication.” This is obviously a dumb
sentence, but it functions as a mission statement for Seattle
Metropolitan: work in a stupid reference and then link that
reference to stupid shit you can buy. Unfortunately,
there are thousands of people in Seattle who adore Seattle
Metropolitan, and they dearly love shopping at University Village.
Many of these people probably think that the U-Village Barnes &
Noble is the greatest bookstore in the universe.
And yet it’s possible to walk through the entire two-floor bookstore
and not once lay eyes on a worthwhile book. There’s a table display of
signed copies of the latest diet-book best seller Skinny Bitch in
the Kitch, but most of the other displays are of $40 framed photos
of flowers (a sign above one of these displays helpfully chirps, “A
picture is worth a thousand words!“) and stationery and other
useless crap.
If you should happen to be in the U-Village Barnes & Noble and
you should happen to ask to see the atheism/agnosticism section, well,
you should prepare for disappointment. A number of atheist books were
released last year—God Is Not Great, The God
Delusion, The Portable Atheist—and a good many of them
became best sellers. Barnes & Noble stocks most of these books in
the philosophy section (next to such faced-out wonders as Pink Floyd
and Philosophy and Embryo: A Defense of Human Life). And the
philosophy section is dwarfed by the mammoth Christian Inspiration
section and the Religious (read: Christian) Fiction section.
This is the standard for Barnes & Nobles across the country. I
sent an e-mail to Mary Ellen Keating, B&N’s spokesperson, asking
why books for nonbelievers were so poorly represented. She replied, “We
are planning to introduce an atheism section as part of the philosophy
subject later this year.” Keating declined to get more specific on a
date. Barnes & Noble is far from the only bookstore in town to not
address atheism as a subject. Elliott Bay Book Company doesn’t have
an atheism section, choosing to shelve the atheism books in general
religion instead, and the University Book Store’s unmarked
atheism/agnosticism section has exactly 12 titles. Classics like
Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not a Christian are shelved
elsewhere. These independent bookstores are losing out on the chance to
one-up one of their chain-store competitors: Borders Books and Music
has the best atheism/agnosticism section in Seattle, and it’s had the
section for years. Seattle Metropolitan‘s stance on the
existence of God remains unknown at press time. 