Jennifer Riest of Regnery Publishing was surprised, to say the least, when she spoke this summer to a distressed shopper from Norman, Okla. 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?
The book is the bestselling title in the firm’s history, and it was printing copies as quickly as it could. Where, Riest asked, had the gentleman from Norman gotten that idea? From a store clerk, he explained, who told him that Regnery had given up on the Aldrich book because it was “a pack of lies.” 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. “It takes a lot for a person to go through the trouble of calling a publisher,” Gonzalez said. So why are they calling? “It is often very hard to get ahold of this book.”
Tales of bookstore-clerk sabotage in the age of conservative best-sellerdom are becoming legendary. Regnery, Free Press, and other publishers are collecting stories — some true, some undoubtedly apocryphal — about the games clerks play at Barnes & Nobles and Borders Books, not to mention at independent bookstores nationwide, whose owners are predominantly liberal.
“Unlimited Access is our number one book,” Linda Caine of Waldenbooks explained in an interview during the summer. “We can’t keep it in the store. We had an uninformed bookseller. It was an isolated incident.”
Was it? Charles Murray, co-author 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. It certainly wasn’t in the most accessible place in the store.”
“There is a real reluctance to stock conservative books,” says Adam Bellow, editor of the Free Press. “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.”
This seems to be the attitude at the Haverford Bookstore in Haverford, Pa., whose manager, Julie Summerfield, explained to Publisher’s Weekly, “There are a lot of books I would just love not to carry.” 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.
Summerfield works at an independent bookstore, one of the small businesses that are quickly becoming among the most romanticized places in America. According to conventional wisdom and the lamentations of Alexander Cockburn 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.” 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. Next to it was a sign that read “DON’T BUY THIS BOOK!” 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.” 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.”
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.” The situation, says Ekizian, is much like that of a baker who refuses to sell rye bread because he doesn’t like it. The independent bookstores have “gone from wouldn’t to couldn’t.” They are ” bad business people,” he says, who “base their decisions on politics.”
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. When Brock’s book on Anita Hill stood at number three on the New York Times bestseller list, Shakespeare and Co. would not put it on display, keeping it discreetly on the shelves. “Every publisher wants their book displayed,” said the store’s owner, Bill Kurland. “We didn’t display it. We may not agree with a book’s importance. There was just not a large enough market for it.” No market? When the book was the third bestselling non- fiction title in the United States?
When The Real Anita Hill was at number three, Rush Limbaugh’s The Way Things Ought to Be was at number two. The Limbaugh book ran into many of the same problems Brock’s did. Ray Hinst, coowner of Haslam’s Books in St. 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.” 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.
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. “We thought Nixon was a rascal and didn’t deserve to have our efforts help him sell books,” he said at the time. Kramer continues to contend, as many independent owners do, that their buying decisions do not constitute censorship; they are the owners of private businesses and can do what they like. Nat Hentoff, a noted civil libertarian and columnist for the Village Voice, disagrees. “I’ve never met anyone who will admit to being a censor,” he says, “but that’s what they’re doing. Some of these book people profess to be all for the First Amendment. And it’s utterly hypocritical.”
Len Vlahos of the American Booksellers Association defends the right of small owners to stock their own shelves as they see fit. What about the censorship idea? 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.” Perhaps Vlahos hasn’t read a poster put out by his own American Booksellers Association. 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. 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.”
Ari Redbord is a senior at Duke University.
