There are something to the order of six or more Barnes and Noble bookstores in the Metropolitan Pittsburgh area. There's one in Squirrel Hill, one in Downtown, one at the Waterfront, and they're installed in every mall in the area. Barnes and Nobel bookstores are like The Gap- you can't have a mall without one. There Are Rules.

Not a single one of these has a copy of Gibson's current book, Pattern Recognition.

I find this particularly amusing in light of the fact that they stock everything from Neuromancer through All Tomorrow's Parties but just seem to have Stopped right there.

They do, however, have not one but two variants of Stephenson's Cryptonomicon. They have the Standard Issue version, which is something to the order of three inches thick with itty bitty type, and they have the Bludgeon Edition, which is roughly the same surface area as a cinderblock halved across its thin side, though considerably lighter.

The Bludgeon Edition is around seven hundred pages and change- considerably less than the Standard Issue version by virtue of being printed on larger sheets of paper.

I bought the Bludgeon, on the grounds it will be handy for both passing the time on the way to Philly and defending myself while visiting, should the need arise.

It is of no surprise to me that the publication © on the inside flap of the Bludgeon is the same year as Parties- coincidentally the year that Pittsburgh peaked and began to tip precariously into the gradual tar-pit suck of decline it's been wallowing in while the rest of the country gets busy with this whole Twenty-First Century thing.