I went on a random perusal through my local library for novellas recently, and there I was, scanning the Bs in the Fiction section, and who do I find but Ray Bradbury sitting on the shelf. Dandelion Wine, Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles, and a couple others sitting right there. Curious, I walked over to the Sci Fi section, and there he was again. Couple of the same books, too, if I remember rightly. Back to the Fiction Bs and moving on, there are titles conveniently marked with a fantasy label scattered in Fiction as well (I haven't looked for fantasy much since moving to this library, so I didn't pay much attention previously). In the Gs I find the Outlander books, which I'd associate more with romance, really, but at least they haven't also double booked Outlander in the Romance genre section like they did with Bradbury (I checked). Onto Os, and sure enough, there's 1984, and then I stopped trying to make sense of it.

I get the argument that Fantasy and SciFi shouldn't always be grouped into a single genre. I also get that not all of Bradbury's books are Sci Fi; many are arguably speculative fiction. Maybe I can see even see pulling speculative fiction into General Fiction. If I squint. But here's my gripe. If the point of sectioning off genre specific sections is to make it easier for patrons to locate materials, why would you put books that the average person would consider part of one genre into an entirely different section? If most people, at this point, expect SciFi and Fantasy to intermingle, why be so set against it that you shelve specifically labeled Fantasy books into general fiction? Why separate the same book into different sections? I know that there will always be grey areas and judgement calls when you shelve by genre (Anne Rice was in Fiction at my old library, for example, but vampires could be argued as belonging in Fantasy), but I personally can't see myself making the choice to shelve The Martian Chronicles, explicitly about humans colonizing Mars, or 1984, widely considered a SciFi classic, in general fiction when there's an oh so convenient section for Sci Fi a few shelves down. Has anyone else seen anything similar? Between that and the new catalog, I feel like I'm losing my mind.