How are things in your city?

There are 2 shelves, each about 4' long, of Go Books at Powell's City of Books in downtown Portland. I do, however, realize that Powell's is an outlier in many ways.

In fairness.. if you went to a bookshop (other than a University bookshop) you wouldn't find many books on physics or maths at a high level..

Foyles doesn't count!!!

It has almost certainly got books on Go but the place is so large (is it 30 miles of bookshelves?) if you did find a book on go someone would have to be sent out to find you...

You would in London. You can find shops with a shelf-ful of books on baseball, which amazes me. The game is virtually non-existent here. Yet Foyles has more baseball books than the biggest shop I found in San Francisco. But English go books are hard to come by except in games shops. Foyles usually has a few on go (5-6), but maybe hundreds on chess (though pruning back heavily in recent times, I suspect).

In Los Angeles, Kinokuniya had about 20 go books in Japanese (and also more go than shogi books, which is not unheard of but a little unusual) for which must be a tiny Japanese-reading population. Mark told me it had several English go books, too. I was surprised at how English books there were on origami - dozens.

It's all so patchy. But rather than blame the booksellers, I think we need to accept that the problem is that people don't buy many go books (even from established go publishers). I was told in Santa Barbara that the reason so few book reviews appear in the AGJ is probably that the editors and most of the AGA administrators don't buy go books themselves, so they pay no heed to books. They will publish a review if offered one, but won't actively seek one out, nor are books highlighted in other ways as a valuable resource (e.g. there is no handy list of books that can be passed to booksellers). The same seems to apply in other associations. As individuals they are entitled to ignore books, of course, but as journalists and administrators this seems likes bad journalism and bad administration. Or maybe I'm the one who's out of touch.

I'm surprised by the results of this thread. I had thought that every Barnes and Noble had one or two of Janice Kim's books, as well as one or two other introductory books, and that it would be the same for other large/chain stores. Guess I was wrong.