>Don't judge me, teenage register girl who recognized the K-On! manga.
>My love is pure.

To elaborate on this a bit now that I'm not posting from my phone in the bookstore parking lot: I had to go to Bangor today for my annual neurology check-in ("Hey, nothing to report." "Awesome. Put up your hands. Push. Pull. Follow my finger. What color is this? Great. See you next year!"), and when I was done there I decided I'd swing by the one chain bookstore left in the city, because what the hell, it's there.

Now, this is not a terribly good bookstore, it must be admitted. It is markedly inferior to the one that used to occupy the same premises (which was a Borders, just for the record). Its selection is fair-to-poor, and the shelves tend to be very poorly curated, particularly in the sections that don't get a lot of turnover. So I didn't have a lot of hope that I would find anything, but, like I say, it was there.

It happens that the English translation of the K-On! manga is being published by an imprint of the publisher with which Amazon is currently having an astonishingly bitchy little slap fight. You've probably heard of this. In a Wal-Martish effort to strongarm vendors into cutting their front-end prices on ebooks, they're making an example of this one outfit by sandbagging customers' orders for their books - not offering unreleased titles for pre-order, arbitrarily assigning the in-print ones to the "eh, maybe it'll ship in two or three weeks" category, and generally being dicks.

I don't want to get into a long discussion about the business models and/or ethics of online booksellers here, but the fact remains that the K-On! manga translations are affected by this state of affairs, so I figured since I was near a Real Bookstore anyway, I'd go in and see if they had any of them.

And, somewhat to my surprise, they had all six of them, all lined up in a neat little row, in the middle of what was, I have to say, a shockingly well-curated manga section (by comparison to the rest of the store).

So, what the hell, I bought them. And the first volume of Girls und Panzer, because G is near K and I happened to spot it while I was standing there trying to orient myself to the shelf and find the latter.

(As an aside, I only vaguely scanned the nearby titles; I've been out of that scene for a long time and have no idea what most of the current hot properties even are, and not much interest in many of the ones whose titles I do sort of recognize, like Attack on Titan, Bleach, and Naruto. However, while I was running my eye along the span between G and K, I ran across a row of volumes with the title Is This a Zombie?, which I have to say is an excellent title, even if I have zero interest in the zombie apocalypse trope at this time. It makes me think of a version of the "Is this a Jew? Is this a German?" section of Mein Kampf where Young Hitler's real beef is with zombies overrunning Vienna. I'm gonna guess that's not what Is This a Zombie? is actually about.)

Anyway, I went to the checkout, and the teenage register attendant said the usual thing, "Did you find everything you were looking for today?" And you know how usually you lie and say you did even if you didn't, or if you weren't looking for anything specific in the first place, but you don't think it's worth getting into it?

Well, today I actually had the opportunity to reply truthfully, "Do you know, I did. I didn't figure you'd actually have all six of these in stock," as I unloaded my purchases onto the counter...

... and her face lit up and she was suddenly all, "OMG I LOVE THIS SHOW HAVE YOU SEEN IT" and we were chatting away about what a charming program it is and who our favorite member of Hōkago Tea Time is (hers is Mio) and so forth. I was... kind of not expecting to have a ONE OF US! ONE OF US! moment today. It was very nice, and at the same time made me feel acutely out-of-demographic for a moment. Hence my post from the parking lot once I'd finished checking out. :)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.