A lack of copies kept booksellers at chains and independents alike explaining to customers why the controversial Unfit for Command was unavailable at their stores for most of last week. The supply shortage became a serious problem for many booksellers because a number of customers accused them of not carrying the title because of a liberal bias against the anti—John Kerry work. Unfit, by John O'Neill and Jerome Corsi, questions Kerry's war record.
In a statement released late Wednesday, Jeff Carneal, CEO of Unfit publisher Regnery Publishing, absolved booksellers from any blame in the controversy. He explained that demand for Unfit "exceeded our expectations," adding, "despite what some customers may believe, it isn't the stores' fault that supplies are scarce." Carneal said that Regnery had received calls from the public alerting them to what some saw as a plot to keep Unfit out of the stores.
Demand for Unfit began much earlier than Regnery expected, building early in August when ads by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth organization challenging Kerry's war service began appearing on TV. Although the authors do not appear in the spots, several men in the book do, and they were making the media rounds. Carneal said Regnery originally had planned to release the title, which it signed in June, in September, but began shipping copies August 6 to take advantage of the media buzz. But because initial trade orders were relatively low—about 30,000—Regnery quickly found itself out of stock despite upping the first print run to 85,000. The company has since gone back to press 10 times and has 650,000 copies in print, with about 325,000 books shipped, Carneal said.
Although Carneal said he had "no complaints at all" about the bookstores' efforts to sell the title, Barnes & Noble had received so many complaints about the book that it issued its own press release early last week, explaining that the reason its stores were not carrying the title was Regnery's inability to keep up with demand. B&N CEO Steve Riggio said that despite suggestions from antagonists, B&N does not have a political agenda. "We let our customers decide what to buy and read," he said. B&N noted that the release of Unfit resulted in thousands of complaints from both ends of the political spectrum. Customers who couldn't find the book claimed that B&N wasn't stocking it or hid it, while others wanted the title removed from store shelves.
What to Sell
The flap over Unfit has brought to light the larger issue of how bookstores have been drafted into the battle between right and left, although the mix of bookstores and politics is nothing new. "One side or the other is always complaining that if a book is not in stock, there's a political conspiracy," said Chris Finan, president of the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression. But booksellers said the complaints have gotten shriller and more frequent in recent months, reflecting the level of discourse outside the bookstore.
Booksellers blame it in part on the parade of Bush-bashing bestsellers earlier this year, led by Richard Clarke's Against All Enemies (Free Press) and Bob Woodward's Plan of Attack (S&S). "There was a moment there when it was all that was coming out," said Sarah Pishko, owner of Prince Books in Norfolk, Va. To conservatives, the sight of all those Bush-bashing titles began to look more like conspiracy than commerce, booksellers said. Syndicated columnist James Lileks reflected the sentiment earlier this month, when he wrote that for anyone who doesn't hate Bush, "The bookstore almost feels like enemy territory."
The presence of Bill Clinton's memoir My Life (Knopf) proved particularly vexing to customers, Pishko said. "I wish I had a nickel for every person who came up to me and said, 'you couldn't pay me to read that book,' " she said.
Like B&N's Riggio, independent booksellers maintain they're not pushing any agenda other than to sell books. But that's not to say they don't have their own biases, or that they don't sometimes struggle with defining their role in the political discussion. "There's always a debate in bookstores between what is censorship and what is selection," said Oren Teicher, COO of the American Booksellers Association. "We at the ABA have always taken the position that stores should represent a wide spectrum of opinions, but bookstores make decisions based on what works for them. There is no one-size-fits-all inventory for all bookstores."
Rani Saijo is the owner of Leaves of Grass Books in ultra-liberal Willits, Calif. "Most of my political book-buying customers lean to the left of the Democratic Party," said Saijo, who clearly shares their ideological orientation. As for whether she feels a responsibility to present books from the full political spectrum, Saijo said, "Truthfully, I haven't fully clarified it." She did, however, recently order a shelf-full of conservative books, including all of Regnery's current titles, in response to complaints from a customer that she was carrying only books by liberals. "My goal is to be a real community bookstore and serve the whole community. So I don't want to exclude anybody or anything. And then again, it's a matter of whether people are going to buy these books," she said.
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