The American Booksellers Association filed a lawsuit against Barnes & Noble and Borders last Wednesday in U.S. District Court for Northern California that “seeks relief from defendants’ pattern and practice of unlawful activity in violation of the Robinson-Patnam Act.” As the preliminary statement of the suit declares, “The Robinson-Patnam Act was enacted in 1936 `to curb and prohibit all devices by which large buyers gained discriminatory preferences over smaller ones by virtue of their greater purchasing power.'” Twenty-six independent bookstores from across the nation are plaintiffs; since the suit hasn’t gone to trial yet, none are discussing specific evidence in their possession that would prove unfair business practices by the two chains. But one example of evidence used in suits of this type brought before by the ABA against publishers has consisted of invoices that were sent by a publisher in error to an independent store which should have been sent to one of the chains and which proved discounts for the chains unavailable to ABA member stores. Confused? In reading the complaint on the ABA website at http://www.bookweb.org/pressroom, I for one was struck by the entirely unexpected literary quality of the legal language in the complaint: “In particular, plaintiffs seek injunctive and declaratory relief; treble damages on behalf of the Bookstore Plaintiffs; disgorgement of illicit gains obtained by Barnes & Noble and Borders in connection with the purchase of books for resale.” Disgorgement? Sounds like an ancient martial rite you might witness in Homer. It’s actually something California courts tend to do whereby illegal profits are paid to a third party. And since when has the word “relief” been used so elegantly? “Treble” damages? This legally lacking observation is not to detract from the wholly serious nature of the allegations; in fact, Barbara Thomas, ABA president and owner of Toad Hall Children’s Bookstore is the very soul of forthrightness and conviction, so she means business when she says, “We wanted people to know this is a serious allegation. It has to stop.”… Claude Stanush also has a way with words, or at least the ability to get memorable ones out of the Newton boys. Stanush is the co-author of The Newton Boys: Portrait of an Outlaw Gang, an oral history from State House Press which of course was the basis for the film, which will be released nationally on March 27. “Interviewing is a special art form,” says Stanush. New York Times Magazine journalist Claudia Dreifus backs him up in her fascinating book Interview. She opens the book by relating “sitting next to Ringo Starr,” to whom she said, “‘Interviewing is something like drumming. You stay in the background and people think you haven’t done much.'” The two eldest Newton brothers, Joe and Willis, sat for hours and hours of interviews beginning in 1973 with Stanush and Trinity University professor David Middleton. The brothers visited Stanush at the Dobie ranch during his Dobie Paisano Fellowship in 1973. Since Stanush and Middleton hadn’t really planned the oral history as a book, its publication didn’t occur until 1994; now, however, Stanush has written a novel based on the oral history, All Honest Men, which has four New York publishers interested. Stanush and Richard Linklater will be at Barnes & Noble Arboretum Monday, March 30, 7:30pm…
Newfangled author Debra Monroe reads at Book People Saturday, March 28, 3pm. Delta Burke, whose new book is called Delta Style: Eve Wasn’t a Size Six and Neither Am I! will be at Book People Saturday, April 4, 1pm. UT doctoral candidate Kim Hewitt will read from Mutilating the Body: Identity in Blood and Ink at Fringeware, Friday, March 27, 8pm.
This article appears in March 27 • 1998 and March 27 • 1998 (Cover).