Shelving
April 3rd, 2006I’ve just been over to Blackwells to buy a copy of Istvan Hont’s Jealousy of Trade (as I’m still thinking that I might go to this). I wasn’t sure whether it’d be in the History, Politics or Economics section of the shop - being a book about the history of political economy - with a fighting chance that they’d have stuck it in Philosophy, as it’s got a lot of Hume in it. It was a good thing I asked: they’d put it in Business.
(The last time a book I wanted was mis-categorised so egregiously over there, come to think of it, was eighteenth-century political-economy-themed, too. I looked for Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees in all the sensible places, only to find it in the end under “Miscellaneous Nineteenth Century Prose”.)
