SubscribeI worked in book stores for many years. Best job ever. Everyone should work in a good book shop at least once in their life. Writing tiny reviews for customers in store kinda got me into blogging in a roundabout way. I was interviewed recently and thinking back at the crap I used to pull in bookstores made me realise I’ve been playing with social media since at least 1999.
But what I wanted to mention here was book advertising – on the whole it’s a mundane business. Book store advertising? Forget it. I remember when a new Thomas Harris novel came out and one of my colleagues emptied the shop window completely, made and displayed a Hannibal Lecter mask and then arterially sprayed red paint all over the display and the window. The locals thought we’d been targeted by anti-something protesters.
I immediately thought of that when I saw this series of ads (1, 2, 3, 4) for Filigranes, a book store chain in Belgium. Here’s my favourite (click to embiggen):
The tag line reads Make your own movie: read a book. The irony is that Kafka Las Vegas should be a movie – or at the very least a heavy metal band.
I haven’t read Kafka in years. Gonna fix that this weekend I think. There should be a short made about a man turning into a bug in a Las Vegas motel though… don’t you think?
I worked at a bookstore, probably the worst job I had. Then again it was a college book store and all we were doing was ripping kids off. I drank strawberry milk while I worked there, that was nice.