Sitting on this privileged shelf in a bookshop confers a lot of kudos, but close examination leaves you wondering why.
Please sir can I have some more grounds for deciding what a classic is? … a hand removes a copy of Oliver Twist from a shelf. Photograph: CBW/Alamy
At the first bookstore I worked in, The Great Gatsby wasn't a classic. Fitzgerald slugged it out in general fiction, side by side with Faulks and Fleming. Fleming wasn't even in crime and thrillers; no, James Bond languished in fiction too.
These decisions, as is the case with all bookstores, had a lot to do with space issues, but our own prejudices came into it. The usuals – Homer, Dostoyevsky, Austen – had at least half a shelf each in classics, while other authors, arguably of the same calibre and importance – Vonnegut, Conrad, Kesey – were kept in fiction.
Undoubtedly important as a figure of his time and of the western literature canon, Fitzgerald just wasn't dead enough or prestigious enough for us to put him in classics. We weren't one of those bewilderingly elitist bookshops that insist on keeping a "literary fiction" section separate, but we were still dictating how customers saw books for the sake of our own reading tastes.
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These decisions, as is the case with all bookstores, had a lot to do with space issues, but our own prejudices came into it. The usuals – Homer, Dostoyevsky, Austen – had at least half a shelf each in classics, while other authors, arguably of the same calibre and importance – Vonnegut, Conrad, Kesey – were kept in fiction.
Undoubtedly important as a figure of his time and of the western literature canon, Fitzgerald just wasn't dead enough or prestigious enough for us to put him in classics. We weren't one of those bewilderingly elitist bookshops that insist on keeping a "literary fiction" section separate, but we were still dictating how customers saw books for the sake of our own reading tastes.
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