Quote:
Originally Posted by Tarana
Barry, I don't know your area or age, but they've had genre demarcation at bookstores even when my mom was a girl and she's 84 now.
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I suspect your grandmother misremembers. I'm 77. I grew up in Texas. From about 14 on I lived in Houston. I was an avid reader since before first grade (I learned to read at home) and an avid bookstore browser since about age 12.
During my younger years I shopped in bookstores in various places in Texas, Louisiana, California, New York, Connecticut and Massachusetts. The first time I ever saw genres in fiction books in a book store was in a Crown Book Store in Houston, probably about 1980. Could have been as early as 1975. I'm really not sure.
It was a few years after that before genre became popular in other bookstores.
There was an occasional exception to that much earlier. A few stores, not many, had a separate section for westerns. Most stores simply had shelves of fiction books arranged in alphabetical order by the last name of the author. There were other shelves for non-fiction, periodicals, pornography in some stores, and hidden somewhere so that decent people wouldn't be offended, science fiction.
Barry