You know what really grinds my gears?

The UCSB Bookstore.

Admittedly, this particular admission is not a revelation. It seems that anyone with the barest semblance of a soul that has had any sort of dealing with the Bookstore possesses some degree of hatred towards it.

Nevertheless, I feel the need to rail against the Bookstore just this once because of a particularly evil practice that has just recently come to my attention.

You see, in addition to providing the student body with costly texts to accompany the various classes offered by the university, the Bookstore carries other seemingly non-school-related items. These items range from full-size posters of fictional Cuban gangsters requesting you to greet their diminutive acquaintances to high-priced, miniscule containers of lip gloss to just about anything that would sit still long enough to have a copyrighted monkey emblazoned on it.

The Bookstore also carries books.

These books aren’t located in that textbook dungeon in the bowels of the UCen. They are displayed in the light of day and marketed to those of us who are inclined to occasionally read a book that is not required for class.

It was in these stacks that I discovered the Bookstore’s latest bit of evil.

You see there are approximately six people on campus who are inclined to occasionally read a book that is not required for class. Of these six, none were inclined to do their recreational book-buying in that over-priced hellhole known as the Bookstore. As a result, a few times a year the Bookstore dumps most of its inventory at those book sales that take up the UCen lobby and generally take up room.

While waiting for my roommate to finish her own shopping in the Bookstore the other day, I dawdled in the stacks. Had it not been for my prescient dawdling, none may have ever discovered the depths of darkness that lie at the heart of the Bookstore.

All of those books awaiting the next inventory-dumping have already been red-tagged. These red tags indicate a dramatic drop in price from the regular price.

And your required texts may lie among them!

That’s right! The Bookstore lures you into its high-priced and badly-lit dungeon to make you pay $12 for that used paperback. Little do you know that in those maliciously perky decorated shelves near the front entrance is the same book: brand-new and marked down to $2.99.

Oh yes, my friends. The Bookstore is mocking you. It is mocking your hard, or hardly, earned money.

I, too, was stunned. Given, I have always sensed the great and powerful malevolence that the Bookstore is imbued with, yet even I never suspected such a particularly malicious act.

So: Be vigilant. As you load those required paperbacks into your basket – $8 here, $12 there – and the powers that be in the textbook department continue to plead innocence and prices set by the corporations, do not be taken in. Just take a stroll by those bookshelves upstairs and see if anything on your reading list is marked down.

You too can stick it to “The Man.” Stick it all the way up his textbook-lined dungeon.

Daily Nexus columnist Bri Lafond is actually collecting red dots for use on the latest art project on the lawn in front of Storke Tower.