Hunter S Thompson

So I finally got paid today, and felt like rewarding myself ever so slightly, hopefully be expanding my knowledge. I decided to go to Chapters and pick up "Fear and Loathing in las vegas" since I had had it referred to me by numerous friends whom I took as people who's book recommendations I respect quite deeply, and had also found out that he (Hunter S Thompson) was a close friend of Kurt Vonnegut, whom I love as an author.

I had previously looked at Fear and Loathing in bookstores, but was broke at the time, and never purchased it. From the previous endeavours I knew that it would be in a strange section (Culture and Culture studies or some nonsense in chapters pointe-claire), so upon breaching the doors of chapters downtown I immediately asked the salesperson on the first floor if she could direct me to the section in which the book could be found. Her response is what inspired this post;

"Well, he should be in culture, but his books are often stolen, so go to the second floor and ask the salesperson and they can most likely point you to them"

"Really?" I say "That's strange isn't it"

"No, its pretty typical"

Slightly off mental kilter I let escalator take me upwards and onwards, where I see one salesperson serving two people, and I grab an overpriced oversugared "going straight to my heart/hips/thighs" coffee which will hopefully allow him to be free once the "Coffee-ologist" is done preparing my caffeineated beast. Now the bookseller is free, and I ask him to point me to them, surprisingly its in the Gay and Lesbians section, and I would be remiss to say that I didn't have a doubt for a moment before realizing that I would buy a good book even if it was in the "These books are for retards that like to lick toilet seats" section. My curiousity gets the better of me, and I ask the gentlemen about the theiving tendencies of Thompson fans.

"Oh yea, that's why we only keep one copy of each of his books on the shelves"

"Really? I find that so strange"

"Oh not at all, Thompson has become hip again (I'm slightly irked at the implication that students would be stealing the books) we have lots of Burroughs and Kerouac that get stolen to, and the Satanic Bible" he says the last with a raucous laugh.

Now this whole ordeal got me thinking, I imagine that the number one sellers are most likely somewhere between Oprah's book club, Harry Potter and Dan Brown, but I wonder how many of that flock actually read there books. Comparitively I would think that a stolen book would merit quite a bit of attention, I wonder what a study of stolen books accross the world would say about our culture, and furthermore I wonder who's stealing them. I'm very tempted to ask whenever I go to a store now, which are there most commonly stolen books, to see what the real people are actually reading.