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Message: <blockquote data-quote="bloodtide" data-source="post: 9465244" data-attributes="member: 6684958">Well....this is a LOT more Bookselling back in the Time Before Time.First a lot of D&D was sold by mail.  Even if you lived by seven malls and eleven bookstores it could be impossible to find a single individual D&D item.  You wanted to buy The Shady Dragon Inn...go to 18 stores and don't find a single copy.  So, for many it was just easier to mail order.  And this was even more true for Dragon and Dungeon.A lot of D&D was also sold in the game/comic/collector stores.Waldenbooks, B. Dalton, and KB Toys were primary Mall Stores. ( I lived one town over from a Waldenbooks that was oddly in a shopping center....the only one I have ever seen.)  As mall stores they had extremely limited inventory space.  Really extreme.  The big things for the bookstores were the 'top popular' books...really that is what they were there for.  So and so put out a new book...they'd have like 50 copies.  Then like calendars and cook books and self help books.  But for anything else...well, they sure did not want a box of books, they wanted five at the most.  Remember they had roughly zero space.  D&D was way, way, way, way down at the bottom of the list....like under coloring books.  The bookstores did not want much D&D stuff as they had no space...and it was not a big seller.  D&D books tended to sit on the shelf forever.  Nothing really matches the amazing smorgasbord of random RPG stuff you could find at a typical mall books store in the 80's and 90's.  Pure paper chaos, with some shrink wrap.KB Toys had the near same issue.  No room.  They stocked plenty of 'common toys', but their main focus was the 'hot fun new popular toys'.  D&D just barley counted as a "game" to the toy store.  Few even carried a couple books...and even then only before x-mas.The only time Sears only had a small D&D selection I've seen was right before x-mas when they would make a special 'games and toy section' out of the home and garden area.Of course.....D&D books were top tier items to be stolen from mall stores...so it was common for a store to just not carry them.  And even putting the books behind the counter would not deter an 80/90's mallrat.  The food court mafia always had D&D books to sell.....And this was on top of the TSR problems.  And they had a lot of them.  Some how, they would send tons of books to some areas...and few or none to others.  And just for another thing.  A LOT of the 90's D&D stuff was boxed sets.  Not "books".  So this pushed them out of the 'book' category and into the 'game' category.  And most of the books stores only wanted 'game boxes' around x-mas.  The non mall small independent bookstores often had a much better RPG section...often a large section.  But not being in a mall did give them a LOT more room.  For years my local Deluxe honkeytonk feed store beer bait barbecue gun shop taxidermist laundromat  had a Village Book Smith with a TON of RPG stuff.  Right next to the VCR rentals where you could rent plain black boxes of tapes with labels written in marker like 'The Star Wars', 'Indy Jones Movie' and 'the Alien Movie'.</blockquote>

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