liberal bookstores
REDBORD, ARI
Ideas Liberal Bookstores, Conservative Books By Ari Redbord Jennifer Riest of Regnery Publishing was surprised, to say the least, when she spoke this summer to a distressed shopper from Norman,...
...When Brock's book on Anita Hill stood at number three on the New York Times bestseller list, Shakespeare and Co...
...What about the censorship idea...
...When Richard Nixon's Memoirs was released five years ago, Sidney Kramer, co-owner of The Remarkable Bookshop in Westport, Conn., refused to carry it...
...Riest's colleague, Ileana Gonzalez, said she received at least a call a day from customers distraught that the "White House had forced the publisher to stop shipment" of Unlimited Access...
...One customer called the publisher when a store clerk tried to talk her into buying Bob Woodward's The Choice rather than the Aldrich title...
...They are "bad business people," he says, who "base their decisions on politics...
...It certainly wasn't in the most accessible place in the store...
...Why, the customer asked, had Regnery "given in to White House pressure" and stopped the presses on Unlimited Access, Gary Aldrich's account of working as an FBI agent inside the Clinton White House...
...person to go through the trouble of calling a publisher," Gonzalez said...
...We can't keep it in the store...
...There was just not a large enough market for it...
...This seems to be the attitude at the Haverford Bookstore in Haver-ford, Pa., whose manager, Julie Summerfield, explained to Publisher's Weekly, "There are a lot of books I would just love not to carry...
...Ray Hinst, co-owner of Haslam's Books in St...
...The fact that bookstore owners make choices about what to order based on their own sensibilities is, he says, "not a criticism ...but a strength...
...Next to it was a sign that read "DON'T BUY THIS BOOK...
...It is often very hard to get ahold of this book...
...When the book was the third bestselling non-fiction title in the United States...
...Summerfield works at an independent bookstore, one of the small businesses that are quickly becoming among the most romanticized places in America...
...John Ekizian, publicity director of the Free Press, says that independent booksellers and even larger stores often attempt to "speak for their customers, but don't really know them...
...Kit Carson, who works for Limbaugh, has heard that store clerks heckled customers, turned covers inside out, and even misfiled the book in the fiction, cooking, or gardening section...
...Where, Riest asked, had the gentleman from Norman gotten that idea...
...No market...
...Some of these book people profess to be all for the First Amendment...
...The attitude is, 'We don't want this kind of clientele.' Many liberal independent owners simply cannot comprehend why anyone would publish a book like The Bell Curve, let alone read it...
...So why are they calling...
...And a certain spirit of suppression as well: Prominently displayed in the window of a small independent bookseller in Buffalo sat David Brock's bestselling The Real Anita Hill...
...We didn't display it...
...Len Vlahos of the American Booksellers Association defends the right of small owners to stock their own shelves as they see fit...
...We thought Nixon was a rascal and didn't deserve to have our efforts help him sell books," he said at the time...
...According to conventional wisdom and the lamentations of Alexander Cock-burn in the Phoenix Gazette, independents are the the salt of the earth: "Just as healthy produce comes out of farmers' markets," writes Cockburn, "healthy literary culture flourishes in the independents...
...I found the most prominent conservative titles are conspicuously missing from her shelves: Unlimited Access ("I don't keep up with the bestseller list," she told me), The Real Anita Hill ("I couldn't get a Macmillan rep, but I'm not sure I would have ordered it anyway"), and Rush Limbaugh's books ("I really don't feel like using my feature space for him when I can feature, for example, What Black People Should Do Now by Ralph Wiley") all were nowhere to be found...
...Was it...
...One independent bookstore, which recently closed, is the subject of more anti-conservative lore than any other: Shakespeare & Co., on New York's Upper West Side...
...Kramer continues to contend, as many independent owners do, that their buying decisions do not constitute censorship...
...The Limbaugh book ran into many of the same problems Brock's did...
...Perhaps Vlahos hasn't read a poster put out by his own American Booksellers Association...
...would not put it on display, keeping it discreetly on the shelves...
...It was an isolated incident...
...Regnery, Free Press, and other publishers are collecting stories—some true, some undoubtedly apoc-ryphal—about the games clerks play at Barnes & Nobles and Borders Books, not to mention at independent bookstores nationwide, whose owners are predominantly liberal...
...It takes a lot for a Ari Redbord is a senior at Duke University...
...they are the owners of private businesses and can do what they like...
...From a store clerk, he explained, who told him that Regn-ery had given up on the Aldrich book because it was "a pack of lies...
...Tales of bookstore-clerk sabotage in the age of conservative best-sellerdom are becoming legendary...
...Petersburg, Fla., has heard an array of "complaints that the staff in certain bookstores wouldn't tell people where [The Way Things Ought to Be] was in the store even when they carried it...
...Unlimited Access is our number one book," Linda Caine of Walden-books explained in an interview during the summer...
...Charles Murray, coauthor of the controversial Bell Curve, discovered that clerks were literally hiding his book, either placing it out of the line of sight or "on the bottom shelf, not displayed where it would be easy to see...
...The independent bookstores have "gone from wouldn't to couldn't...
...Ideas Liberal Bookstores, Conservative Books By Ari Redbord Jennifer Riest of Regnery Publishing was surprised, to say the least, when she spoke this summer to a distressed shopper from Norman, Okla...
...which in turn was next to a negative review...
...Independents, as Carla Cohen of Washington, D.C.'s Politics & Prose, explains, "make editorial decisions based on what our customers are interested in and our own tastes...
...The poster declares: "The shelves of this bookstore hold a wide array of titles containing ideas as diverse as the world in which they live...
...Every publisher wants their book displayed," said the store's owner, Bill Kurland...
...We sincerely believe that it is in the best interests of our democratic society for ideas of all kinds to be available to interested individuals, regardless of what our own tastes may be...
...We had an uninformed bookseller...
...Yet, as Adam Bellow says, it is often hard for activist owners to separate the politics from the prose: "What we see in these gestures of self-righteous censorship is actually politics masquerading as taste...
...I've never met anyone who will admit to being a censor," he says, "but that's what they're doing...
...And it's utterly hypocritical...
...The book is the bestselling title in the firm's history, and it was printing copies as quickly as it could...
...There is a real reluctance to stock conservative books," says Adam Bellow, editor of the Free Press...
...Nat Hentoff, a noted civil libertarian and columnist for the Village Voice, disagrees...
...We may not agree with a book's importance...
...The situation, says Ekizian, is much like that of a baker who refuses to sell rye bread because he doesn't like it...
...When The Real Anita Hill was at number three, Rush Limbaugh's The Way Things Ought to Be was at number two...
Vol. 2 • November 1996 • No. 9
