At Avant Game, they're up to silly things:
How to Serve the Ministry of Reshelving
1. Select a local bookstore to carry out your reshelving activities.
2. Download and print "This book has been relocated by the Ministry of Reshelving" bookmarks and "All copies of 1984 have been relocated" notecards to take with you to the bookstore. Or make your own. We recommend bringing a notecard and 5-10 bookmarks to each store.
3. Go to the bookstore and locate its copies of George Orwell's 1984. Unless the Ministry of Reshelving has already visited this bookstore, it is probably currently incorrectly classified as "Fiction" or "Literature."
4. Discreetly move all copies of 1984 to a more suitable section, such as "Current Events", "Politics", "History", "True Crime", or "New Non-Fiction."
5. Insert a Ministry of Reshelving bookmark into each copy of any book you have moved. Leave a notecard in the empty space the books once occupied.
6. If you spot other incorrectly classified books, feel free to relocate them.
7. Please report all reshelving efforts to the Ministry. Email your store name, location, # of 1984 copies reshelved, and any other reshelving activities conducted, to reshelving @ avantgame.com. Photos of your mission can be uploaded to Flickr, tagged as "reshelving", and submitted to the Ministry of Reshelving group.
Our goal is to relocate one thousand nine hundred and eighty-four copies, and to complete successful reshelving of 1984 in all 50 United States. Global contributions are welcome.
//The Magic 8-Ball says, "What am I doing here in the egg tray?"\\
2 comments:
Sorry, I can't agree with this. It always bugs me when authors like Vonnegut, Bradbury and Ellison would write something that was clearly dealing with rockets or advanced science or the future, but because they were "serious artists", they had to deny it was science-fiction. It doesn't matter how accurate the predictions, or that 1984 was a tale of the distant future now set a generation in the past, George Orwell's "1984" is and always will be science-fiction. Claiming it isn't because of its quality denigrates an entire genre. It's like claiming "Concrete" isn't a super-hero comic just because it's a good one.
Please note that _1984_ was not being moved from "Science Fiction" to "Literature" but from "Fiction" to "History" or "True Crime".
I agree wholeheartedly with your point. In high school, the English teacher said "Flowers For Algernon" was "almost like science fiction", and I pointed out that it had won a Hugo for Best Science Fiction Novelette of 1960.
Actually, I think moving all the copies of _1984_, _Brave New World_, _Naked Lunch_, &c. to the Science Fiction shelf would make a very good Ministry project.
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