A More Permanent Hell

On Friday evening, at the grocery store, I found the vestigial books-and-magazines section gone. Not relocated: vanished. Some of the remaining magazines seem to have been squeezed into the impulse racks near each register, but that looks temporary.

On Sunday afternoon, at the department store, I did not find any of the three items I went there for, and decided to swing by their books section before coming home. I was overwhelmed with the new-to-me "vocabulary" of contemporary book covers. This has been coming on slowly for quite a while, but it bowled me over in that moment. I could not tell the genres at a glance. No cover has traditional paintings or photographs. Everything is bright (or shiny/glittery on dark) shapes and single objects, or, if it's people, they are "cut outs," like that certain kind of clip art often used on business trainings. The edges of the pages are all gilded or otherwise painted, which used to be a sign of a very fancy special edition, like Franklin Mint or better, but seems now the norm. I couldn't even tell which were for adults versus young adults at a glance at their exteriors. (And few were not thick. I saw very, very few that physically signaled "quick read" to me.)

On Monday evening, at the drug store, I was relived to find their vestigial books-and-magazines section intact. It's not much, and the magazines are a lower tier than many the grocery store had sold, but it's there. Interestingly, other than a few -- leftovers? -- in the traditional mass-market form factor, most of its books were what I guess must be the new mass-market form factor: they are as tall as trade paperbacks, but not as deep. On your shelf, spine out or pages out (which I gather is a thing now: weird), they will look like trade paperbacks. They use a little more paper, I suspect, than a traditional mass-market book, but perhaps not a lot. However, they definitely won't fit in even a generous pocket.