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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cthulhu's Librarian" data-source="post: 1883609" data-attributes="member: 11064">Who decides what the difference between literature and fiction is?  :\ I worked for many years in bookstores, and this is one of my pet peeves about genre seperation. One store was part of the no longer in business Lauriet's Books, and the decision of what went into fiction and what went into Classics/Literature was decided by the buyers at the national office. they usually went by what was put on the spine by the publisher, but not always. There were plenty of books that were shelved in the Fiction section that damn well should have been in Literature, and many books that were in Classics just because they were old (or they said "Classic" on the spine), but not necessarily good or even noteworthy.  And then there were authors that had 3 or 4 books in Fiction, 3 or 4 in Classics, and another 3 or 4 in various genre sections. The less division the better. Breaking out SF, Fantasy, Western, Romance, etc is ok, those are specific enough genres with fairly well defined readers (but even within the genres, there are cross genre titles...).</blockquote>