Organization of Manga

A couple of days ago, my mom and I went shopping at a Catholic book/gift store. I was eager to peruse the used book section, but upon entering it was rather appalled to find the volumes organized alphabetically by title.

In this mess, I was able to find a book on Liberation Theology by Rosemary Ruether, but unable to find anything else by her, as I do not have her body of works memorized.


I would say that I've never encountered this method of organization before, but I have! Most bookstores that sell manga or manhwa organize the series alphabetically by title. The only place I've seen manga organized by manga-ka is in the bookstore I work at.

I am not sure why this practice happens. People who loved Naoki Urasawa's Monster might not know that they should try 20th Century Boys next. Similarly, it may have taken a while for fans of Ai Yazawa's Paradise Kiss to find NANA (although perhaps not so long, as at least these titles are close in the alphabet).

Does anybody know why this happens? Is it a racial thing, like some asshole at Barnes & Noble said, "Even though that name is spelled with Roman letters, I can't pronounce it! I don't know what the hell all of this Asian crap is....let's just alphabetize it by title!"

I could see some kind of uninformed "Only kids read manga, and they only know the authors," but this type of organization doesn't happen in the children's section of bookstores, does it?


I think perhaps because I recently read Joanna Russ's How to Suppress Women's Writing for the first time (for Beer & Marmalade), I was really glad to read a collection of short stories by Masami Tsuda (manga-ka of Kare Kano) this weekend. The tankoubon does a great job of showing her range, from fantasy stories to Victorian England to present-day high school in Japan.

I hope that publishers will acquire more works by my favorite manga-ka in the future, and once released, I hope that I'll be able to find them.