The snob set

Memorandum

To: Marketing department, Book Behemoth, Inc.

From: Employee who may or may not be a cultural snob

Let me preface what follows with a few pertinent facts that have come to light since the literary scandal surrounding James Frey. In addition to having more than 20 million viewers of her television show, Oprah Winfrey lends her name to an online book club that boasts approximately 800,000 members. Such a vast audience no doubt represents a potential windfall for our industry, book selling.

No, scratch potential; make that actual: Witness how being featured as Miss Winfrey’s book selection helped propel Janet Fitch’s “White Oleander,” Robert Morgan’s “Gap Creek” and Mr. Frey’s “A Million Little Pieces” onto the best-seller list.

Yes, Mr. Frey’s bleak addiction memoir turned out to be, in part if not in whole, a fabrication. But Miss Winfrey apologized for defending the book so strenuously, and boldly confronted the author in front of the aforementioned television audience.

That Miss Winfrey encourages her audience to read is great news for books, right?

I’m not convinced. Here’s why.

I notice daily on our bookshelves — our exquisitely organized and maintained bookshelves, I hasten to add — the “Oprah’s Book Club” insignia on not just contemporary books such as “House of Sand and Fog,” but on classic works such as Nobel Prize winner Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” I also noticed Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina,” as well as a variety-store-style three-pack of William Faulkner novels bearing the Oprah imprint.

Why is this in any way alarming?

Simple: I fear such a marketing gambit may serve to dampen sales of our merchandise among a certain segment of book buyers. They tend to be wealthy and well educated and highly selective in their habits of consumption. (Less charitable persons sometimes call them “snobs.”)

I can think of no more surefire way of discouraging highbrow customers from purchasing highbrow books than slapping them with the “Oprah” seal of approval. As a cultural brand, Miss Winfrey is the equivalent of Home Depot, American-made sedans or commercial radio.

The writer Joseph Epstein explained it this way in his book “Snobbery: The American Version”: In some circles, sophistication is “determined by being around other people thought tasteful, taking pleasure in cutting oneself away from the mass by the criterion of ostensible good taste, and being supremely confident in judging — and thereby putting down — others by the standard of what one takes to be one’s own exquisite taste.”

That reminds me. There is a marker as poisonously dissuasive as Oprah’s Book Club. It’s the one that says “Now a major motion-picture,” which to onlookers is a dead giveaway that you weren’t hip to the book before Hollywood.

A personal anecdote may help illuminate the latter contention. Recently, a friend recommended I read Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel “Everything Is Illuminated.” My interest thus piqued, I decided to do so — only to see the paperback copy we are currently selling emblazoned with a surpassingly odd photograph of the actor Elijah Wood, who, apparently, stars in the movie.

I chose not to buy the book, even with my generous employee discount.

“How might such cross-promotional methods affect one’s decision to buy books whose contents are in no way altered?” you ask.

Fair question.

Let me posit a question of my own: Have you ever snooped inside the medicine cabinet of a prospective mate, fearing the sight of certain prescriptions or ointments?

Well, the book buyers of whom I speak perform similarly secretive interrogations of others’ bookshelves. They also may impose strict standards of segregation on their own library. (As an example, my significant other grew quite upset when I protested her casually squeezing in “He’s Just Not That Into You” next to my copy of Thomas Mann’s “Doctor Faustus” — which I plan to read one day, truly.)

A wonderfully witty new book, “The Film Snob’s Dictionary,” by David Kamp and Lawrence Levi, defines a film snob as someone for whom the actual enjoyment of movies is secondary to “the accumulation of arcane knowledge about them.”

With regard to books, the matter is not nearly so complicated.

Jonathan Franzen was quite entitled to worry, in 2002, that those who came to “The Corrections” on Miss Winfrey’s recommendation might not grasp the subtle artistry of his novel. That’s because Oprah book-club members might be assumed to have read, or tried to read, the novel.

And reading books, as Michael Kinsley once pointed out, is not the point of buying books.

The point of buying books is to own books, and thereby show them off to (equally tasteful) visitors. Hence the worry over chick-lit shelf contamination, and the “Now a major motion-picture” giveaway.

I propose a simple solution to this problem: Segregate the “Oprah” books into a special section.

Put it next to “Self-Help,” and call it “For Philistines.”