Twenty-odd years ago back when I was a young man working at Himber’s book warehouse in Eugene unpacking box after box of everything from Gödel, Escher, Bach to Sweet Valley High: Double Love, I picked up the habit of reading the back cover copy of nearly everything that I touched, just to inform myself about what was on the market. I had a particular fondness for the copy on romance novels, and when I found a particularly good one, I’d save it for a dramatic reading to my co-workers, which usually got a laugh.
After I moved to Portland and had worked at Powell’s for a while, I ended up in charge of stocking the popular fiction section. I called it the “swastika and bodice” section, because about half of what I stocked was thrillers of some sort, which tended to have visual referents to the Communists or the Nazis on the cover, or they were romance titles. I continued my practice of reading out the covers, and at one point made the suggestion that this could be turned into some sort of event.
Other, more-highly-placed people than myself (I didn’t even do the ordering for the section, which was itself looked down upon because it was, well “popular” fiction) did the organizing, but on the next Valentines Day, there was a packed crowd in the Anne Hughes Coffee Room, where several actresses from the community — and one guy, me — read passages from a variety of bizarre and sultry novels.
None of them, however, had anything about ferrets in them, so far as I’m aware.