When I started to visit the mall bookstore in my adolescence, I went straight to the Humor section. It was there that I located the latest collection of “Garfield” strips, and, within a year or two, could peruse every one of the “Truly Tasteless Jokes” books before purchasing them (I owned five or six before realizing that some of the jokes were becoming repetitive). I wasted time there, and wasted a lot of money on comic-book collections, graduating from “Garfield” to “The Far Side.”

Always I went straight to the Humor section, where I would camp out until the movie I had come to the mall to see was about to start. Sometimes I might pause at the magazine rack near the front of the store, but browsing the mags in front of the cashier was, in those days, frowned upon. So I’d head past the bestsellers, the fiction, and the nonfiction and take comfort in the two small rows dedicated to Humor. If memory serves, those “Garfield” collections were big sellers back in the day (the early 1980s).

I’m not sure what’s happened to sales of Humor books, but Jack Handey has written a hilarious article about the placement of these sections within bookstores around the country. Apparently the Humor section isn’t as easy to find as it once was.