Ruth Scurr: preference

Transcript context

…I went to the Arlington County Public Library this morning, and there they have it: a separate section called “biographies.” And in that section are all the biographies. But that’s actually a funny kind of segregation. Should they do that? I think about that in bookshops a lot. I’m not sure. I think it’s better to integrate them with the history books. I don’t want to tell other people, either, how to do their jobs. Sometimes I go into a bookstore or a library and I’m thinking, “What is this? Why is it organized that way? ” Maybe there’s something I’m not seeing. But I’m always very disappointed if I go to the biography section, because — apart from anything else — it kind of looks so random. It’s just like the recent biographies — and you’re jumping between periods. I think it would be much more interesting to have, at least with the historical biographies, them integrated by period. That’s what I would do, but I’m not running a bookstore or a library. As you may know, Daunt Books in London, in fact, organizes by country. A biography of Napoleon is in the France section. That, to me, seems much better.…

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