Maud points to this Daily Kos item. The rumor is that orders for Tim Schilke’s Growing Up Red: Outting Red America from the Inside are being canceled by the Ingram Book Group, a wholesaler that ships books for Barnes & Noble out of Tennessee.
Unfortunately, the Daily Kos didn’t consider actually calling Ingram, the Nashville based wholesaler in question. So what we have right now is an unconfirmed rumor. Being here on the West Coast, I caught wind of this news item after business hours, but I did track down the appropriate number. I spoke to a very nice Ingram employee who wished to remain anonymous. But he said that he was very aware of the title, but declined to provide information. He believed that he might have seen the title on a shipping circular, but couldn’t quite remember.
If orders for Growing Up Red are being cancelled, my hope is to determine the precise reasons why and see what the horse’s mouth has to say. But to get the true story on this, we’re going to have to do some work. If anybody reading this has actually tried to order this book from a Barnes & Noble in a red state, I would appreciate it if someone emailed me the precise store you tried to buy the book from, so that I can contact them and speak to the store’s manager.
You know, I really like Kos, but some of the “recommended” diaries are pretty frivilous and poorly researched. I saw this up there yesterday and I thought that there could be something to it, but it could just as easily have been a benign mistake.
As I remember, it was only 2 books of his that hadn’t shipped, definitely within the margin of error. Sad to say, but there is sometimes kind of a groupthink up on Kos–you just wave some kind of vague indication of anti-liberal bias and people jump all over it without looking below the surface. I notice this more often on the “recommended” diaries than on the main posts by Kos.
Except for Scott’s, the comments have added nothing to this discussion. I fail to see how hangover vitamins are relevant to the issue of censorship by Ingram. And the last comments contained misspelled vulgar words. Is there a name for this kind of blog-comments spam yet?
My own experience with Ingram: in 1996 a small press published a book of short stories of mine. After a fairly favorable review of the book appeared in the NYTBR (“Books in Brief,” natch), my publisher tried to get Ingram to distribute the book. They sent him back a form rejection and a pamphlet on how to get books reviewed in magazines and newspapers.