Steven Beattie exposes a remarkable arrogance from Australian book chain Angus and Robertson. The hubris was directed towards small to medium-sized distributors. According to The Sydney Morning Herald, Angus and Robertson is now demanding that distributors pay between A$2,500 and A$100,000 to keep their books stocked in the stores. In a letter from ARW Group Commercial Manager Charlie Rimmer to Tower Books’s Michael Rakusin, complete with attached invoice, Rimmer wrote:

We have recently completed a piece of work to rank our suppliers in terms of the net growth they generate for our business. We have concluded that we have far too many suppliers, and over 40% of our supplier agreements fall below our requirements in terms of profit earned. At a time when the cost of doing business continues to rise, I’m sure you can understand that this is an unpalatable set of circumstances for us, and as such we have no option but to act quickly to remedy the situation.

Accordingly, we will be rationalizing our supplier numbers and setting a minimum earnings ratio of income to trade purchases that we expect to achieve from our suppliers.

The letter caused Rakusin to respond with a lengthy letter of his own, which reads in part:

In summary, we reject out of hand this notion that somehow, even giving you 45% discount on a Sale or Return basis, with free freight to each of your individual stores, where we make less than half of that on the same book, puts us in the “category of unacceptable profitability”. We have seen Angus & Robertson try this tactic before – about 12 years ago Angus & Robertson decided that unless we gave them a 50% discount, they would not buy from us any longer. We refused. Angus & Robertson desisted from buying from us for seven months. We survived, Angus & Robertson came back cap in hand.

We have seen Myer effectively eliminate smaller suppliers. We survived and prospered but look at the Myer Book Departments today.

We have seen David Jones decide that it had too many publishers to deal with and to exclude the smaller suppliers. We survived and prospered but look at the David Jones Book Departments today.

David Jones and Myer sell other goods; Angus & Robertson does not.

That the contents of your letter of 30 July are both immoral and unethical, I have no doubt. That they probably contravene the Trade Practices Act, I shall leave to the ACCC to determine. (Five percent interest PER DAY !!!)

As Beattie observes in his post, Tower Books is hardly the runt of the litter. It handles the Australian distribution for DC Comics, the Hachette Book Group, the Overlook Press, and many more.

Angus & Robertson Chief Operating Officer Dave Fenlon responded to all this at Crikey, attempting to set the matter straight. Fenlon confessed that “the tone of this correspondence was inappropriate” and observed that A&R had sent letters along the lines of Rimmer’s to 47 of its 1,200 suppliers. (By contrast, New Matilda reported a few days later that A&R wrote to “more than 160 local publishers giving them just over two weeks to shell out thousands of dollars.”) Fenlon wrote:

Again, let me assure you that this is not about penalising authors. It is about establishing commercial arrangements with our suppliers that are viable for both parties and that allow us to offer the best value to our customers.

If a bookstore chain uses such strongarm tactics towards a particular distributor — perhaps the only distribution conduit for a particular author — how is an author not penalized by this? (Rakusin also responded to this letter, observing, “How does Mr. Fenlon explain the incongruity between his claim that he has 1200 suppliers and has sent letters to only 47 of them when the Australian Publishers Association says that more than 70% of APA member publishers have been contacted by A&R, either directly or via their distributor?”)

I plan to do more digging on this story. Not only does this reflect a troubling scenario comparable to the AMS bankruptcy earlier this year, but this could very well set an international business precedent. If an Australian bookstore chain can get away with sending unexpected invoices sent to distributors, demanding a premium payment because the profit margin is not as staggering as they desire and effectively blackmailing distributors, what is to stop a bookstore chain in another country from attempting the same?

This is a reminder that Maud Newton will be interviewing Rupert Thomson tonight at 7:00 PM at McNally Robinson. Please be sure to check this out, as this is a rare American appearance by one of today’s most underrated fictive stylists. I know that a number of litbloggers and other swell folks will be there. So stop by and say hello.

To get up to speed on Thomson, check out Thomson’s first appearance on Segundo (a second appearance is forthcoming), as well as James Hynes’s “The Dreamlife of Rupert Thomson.”

Glenn Greenwald: “To this day, many people, including myself, cite the Padilla case as the ultimate wake-up call to the true character, the genuine soul, of the Bush administration. Imprisoning a U.S. citizen, on U.S. soil, with no charges of any kind, and then keeping him for years completely incommunicado, is just one of those lines which many people believed would never be crossed in America. That this bright line was crossed, and crossed so explicitly and with so little controversy, was an unmistakable sign of just how much of our national character was being eroded, just how limitless was the attack on our basic constitutional framework, just how profoundly our political press was failing.”

More from me soon, but hopefully four podcasts in two days should tide you over.

At last night’s book launch party for Kate Christensen’s The Great Man, I observed a bald man — much shorter than I had expected — resembling a certain journalist working for Time Magazine. It was none other than Lev Grossman, my proud nemesis. Lev had been wiser than me in maintaining his bald form. I had allowed my hair to grow back, complete with its ridiculously receding hairline, after a brief experimental phase in which I had forgotten to acquire a drug habit or transform into some consciously ironic Williamsburg hipster, but that mostly involved seeing if I could effect some bald badass corporeal form with ridiculously cherubic cheeks. The experiment, alas, had mixed results, particularly since I had laryngitis during most of my hairless stint and because Daniel Mendelsohn had confused my lack of voice with a diffident stance. And I remain convinced that I could beat Mr. Mendelsohn in an aggressive game of ping-pong or Connect Four. But no matter. This is unnecessary bravado, but it must be set down for the record. I know I can win. I do plan to revisit this hairless approach later, perhaps when I am feeling more masculine or I have just eaten twenty pounds of raw ground chunk and jogged six times around Prospect Park and I have shouted Hemingway passages at the top of my lungs.

Anyway, Lev was there. And I introduced myself as his nemesis. It took three attempts before he figured out who I was.

“Ed?” he said, unaware that I had moved to New York.

It turns out that he lives not far from me, that he genuinely likes William Gibson (I quizzed him on Count Zero), and that he is a more or less friendly person. Kate Christensen, who was somehow cognizant of last year’s skirmish, remarked, “But you’re both such nice guys!” I assured Ms. Christensen that she was wrong. Lev and I enjoyed a Moriarty-Holmes relationship. We were both gentlemen and we didn’t wish to unleash our fury upon an unsuspecting crowd.

Is this the end of the Lev-Ed loggerjam? Well, who is to say? Mr. Grossman appears on the surface to be quietly charming and perhaps just a tad misunderstood. But I still believe him to be made of sturdier stuff and indeed pressed him on this pedantic character quality over twenty minutes of conversation. He took it well.

I slipped away so that Lev would think himself safe. But, of course, I concoct silly and meticulously contrived plans that will be unleashed at a time of my choosing.