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the
current
Monday
Report
below!
This week's report by Lawrence Richette
BARRED FROM BARNES AND NOBLE!
In May 2005, Barnes and Noble Rittenhouse Square
Philadelphia allowed me to use their third floor space
for a reading/book signing. I chose the verb in that
sentence carefully. Before I could get the event
in the store calendar, I had to negotiate with the
management for weeks. As a Philadelphia novelist
publishing his third book in three years, I was
slightly mystified by their skittishness. Shouldn't
Barnes and Noble be helping local authors, rather than
putting roadblocks in their way?
The event went well enough, but as King Wenclas noted
in his blog, I was more than a little nervous that
night. It wasn't the small crowd of family and friends
that daunted me. It was the fact that after
weeks of notice and consultation with the store, I
arrived to find a space completely unprepared for my
presence. Sweating profusely, I had to hurry to put out
fifty heavy metal chairs myself, and by the time my
guests and a few curious spectators drawn by the sign
at street level arrived, I felt like a Teamster.
If only I had known that night how tortured my
relations with Barnes and Noble would become in a mere
five months, I would have told my guests to forget it
and held the event in the middle of the Square.
My novels are published by Xlibris, a division of
Random House, which is owned in turn by the German
media conglomerate Bertelsmann. This means, in
practice, that I must pay for the publication of my own
books. The price is relatively low and I have no real
complaints with Xlibris. But the management of Barnes
and Noble knew my situation, and treated me
accordingly. They would never have treated Jennifer
Weiner, another local author who writes the kind of
trash that Hollywood and the best-seller lists adore,
with the same casual contempt.
But I was not to be so easily scared off. In the
summer of 2005, knowing that my fourth novel would be
published in January 2006, I went to the very sweet
woman who runs book promotions in the Rittenhouse
Square store and obtained a list of all the Barnes and
Noble stores. She agreed with me that I should start
making plans for a national tour and promised me that
B and N would cooperate in every way. I left her office
that day with visions of large sales and groupies
dancing in my head.
I should add that I had fallen into the habit of
doing all my book-shopping, including birthday and
Christmas gifts for my far-flung friends (I am anal
retentive in such matters), at the Rittenhouse Square
store. Between May and October, I must have spent
several thousand dollars that way. None of that would
matter when push came to shove.
In the interests of full disclosure, I should add
that I was carrying on a flirtation with the manager of
the drinks counter, a young Princeton girl who was
pierced in some very interesting places, or so she
claimed. This may explain why disaster struck when and
how it did.
In October, the store manager angrily informed me
that:
a) my January reading was cancelled, and
b) I was barred from the store "for life"
Why? Had I shoplifted? Had I grabbed the cleavage of
the scantily clad checkout girl at the front counter
when I was charging another two hundred dollars worth
of books on my VISA card?
Oh no, my offense was far direr! I had made a
"politically incorrect comment at the cappuccino bar."
Sadly, I swear by all that's holy to me that I am
repeating the store manager's comment verbatim.
The absurdity of a bookstore, let alone the biggest
chain bookstore in America, enforcing political
correctness is insane--or should seem that way to those
of us who still value free speech. And in Philadelphia
too, where the First Amendment was written! Needless to
say, the politically correct liberals who run Barnes
and Noble Philadelphia undoubtedly voted for Gore and
Kerry in the last two so-called Presidential elections.
But their liberalism is shallow and meaningless. They
denied me the most basic elements of due process (see
the Fourteenth Amendment and its case law). The store
manager refused to repeat what I said, and to close my
personal story on a dramatic note, the last time I
dared to cross the threshold of the store, she began
calling the Philadelphia police.
This bizarre episode demonstrates a number of
disturbing truths about the sorry state of American
culture in the Age of Bush. Leaving aside how
provincial Philadelphia remains to this day, the simple
fact is that the big bookstore chains (B and N and
Borders) have monopolistic power in today's
marketplace. And they know it. And like the store
manager who barred me from Ritenhouse Square for life,
and threatened to have me arrested, they abuse their
power every day.
In the suburbs, which is where most of America lives
now, the big chains ARE the only bookstores. Their
purchasing decisions are seemingly made elsewhere,
probably in Manhattan, the epicenter of world finance
capitalism, the place where most of Publisher's Row has
been bought out by foreign conglomerates like
Bertelsmann and, not coincidentally, the place where--
over the past twenty years--books have become a less
profitable adjunct to the global entertainment industry.
None of this happened by accident. And unfortunately
none of this happened overnight, so that the writers
and the book buyers were slowly accustomed to a truly
dreadful state of affairs. A classical Marxist would
analyze the dreadful situation of book publishing and
distribution in America today by pointing to the
resurgence of monopoly capitalism under Reagan and Bush
the Elder--a development which continued in the
Clinton years, however differently the liberal media
portrayed Clintonomics. After all, as Lenin pointed out
decades ago, the natural tendency of capitalism is
monopolistic, whether the commodity in question is
petroleum or books.
What is so sad for America is that B and N/Borders
are squeezing out independent bookstores, of which
fewer and fewer manage to stay afloat every year. And
outside the big cities they have nearly all been forced
to close since the Eighties. In general, the
independent bookstores that survive have a special-
interest clientele, like gays and lesbians, or African-
Americans, or ethnic minorities like speakers of
Cantonese.
Gresham's Law in economics, a law relating to
currency, holds that counterfeit currency always
reduced the value of authentic money. Perhaps, to
understand today's miserable book publishing and
distribution scene, is (John) Grisham's Law. In a NEW
YORK TIMES interview several years ago, the wildly
popular junk novelist let slip the fact that IN
HIS PUBLISHING CON TRACT he is explicitly forbidden
from submitting anything other than legal thrillers to
his publisher. The TIMES reporter noted that Grisham
seemed depressed about that fact.
Hence Grisham's Law: give the American public only
what the publishers and the big chain retailers want
them to read, what they can market like the clothes our
retailers now import from China and Singapore. And the
other half of Grisham's Law is that the monopolies--if
we let them--will drive out new, vital American
literature just as surely and predictably as
counterfeit currency drives out real money.
That is the state of our dead-end culture in the
Year of Our Lord 2006. Is there any hope? Not to change
the monopolies, I'm afraid. They are too entrenched
and, as I found out in Rittenhouse Square to my
chagrin, their lackeys are all too willing to wield
their unearned power like a club.
The only hope for American literature is the DIY
aesthetic the ULA committed to years ago. In my own
case, the story had a reasonably happy ending--I
rescheduled my reading at one of the best used
bookstores in Philadelphia. But I am 46 and the veteran
of many battles in my hometown. What of the younger
generation?
Despite all the available evidence, I have hope.
Those who are meant to break through, whether by
publishing zines or making the more costly decision I
made to go the Xlibris route, will somehow break
through. I recommend to all my readers that they begin
boycotting Barnes and Noble and Borders and seek out
small, independent bookstores instead. If none exist in
your community, and you have a credit card, purchase
books via Amazon.com instead. The big chains, like all
corporations, are sensitive to the slightest
fluctuations in their sales, and we need to stop
feeding the greedheads who would presume to tell us
what to read.
That may not be a panacea, but at least we can stop
being complicit in the witting or unwitting conspiracy
to strangle a better American literary culture.
………………………………………………………………………
Lawrence Richette resides in Philadelphia. His latest book,
Collateral Damage, and other titles, are available through Xlibris
(click to order) and Amazon (click to order).
………………………………………………………………………
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