Indie Bookseller Cancels Ayers/Dohrn Event
By Claire Kirch -- Publishers Weekly, 4/2/2009 1:29:00 PM
Anderson’s Bookshop in Naperville, Ill., canceled an author event scheduled for April 8 with 1960’s husband-and-wife radicals William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, promoting their book Race Course: Against White Supremacy, after receiving, according to Anderson’s co-owner Tres Anderson, “too many phone calls that were very ugly in nature.” An appearance by Ayers at Naperville North High scheduled for earlier that day was also canceled by school officials.
Anderson reported that “disturbing” phone calls condemning the store for hosting Ayers and Dohrn, whose book was released by Third World Press in February, started on March 26 and continued through April 1, with the bulk of the calls received Saturday, March 28, resulting in booksellers on duty fearing for their safety. As the store does not have caller ID, Anderson said he has no way of knowing whether the calls were local, or were part of some organized effort orchestrated from elsewhere. The decision to cancel the event was made Monday and announced on the store’s Web site Wednesday.
“We live in a community where nothing would probably happen,” Anderson noted, “But you just can’t take that chance. It’s a safety issue for both customers and for staff.”
Anderson also said that after the store informed patrons of the Ayers cancellation, they received numerous phone calls and “at least 100 emails” from customers, with the majority expressing disappointment at the cancellation, as well as “support for the store and for the rights of authors.”
Anderson’s is continuing to sell Ayers’s and Dohrn’s book, as well as their previous publications, but may end up returning the bulk of “quite a few” copies of both Race Course and Ayers’ memoir, Fugitive Days: Memoirs of an Anti-War Activist (Beacon Press, Nov. 2008) to the publishers.
Anderson and his three fellow co-owners are planning to host a forum to be held offsite in the “very near future” to address freedom of speech issues. They hope that those on both sides of the issue will attend. The date and place for the forum have not been determined, but information about it will be posted on the store’s Web site when plans are finalized.
Catherine Compton, marketing director at Third World Press in Chicago, reports the company has not received “any kind of negativity at all” after releasing Ayers and Dohrn’s book with a 20,000-copy print run on February 19. The press is piggybacking on Ayers’s speaking engagements in scheduling author events across the country, in bookstores and at other venues. While several of Ayers’s recent speaking engagements have been canceled because of pressure put on event organizers, no other event scheduled by Third World Press to promote this book has been canceled. “We had 300 people at an event sponsored by 57th Street Books and held at International House on the University of Chicago campus,” Compton said.
For his part, Ayers claims that Anderson’s cancellation is the first time a bookstore has responded to threats and complaints by cancelling his appearing there, though it’s occurred at universities and libraries. In fact, he says, while four of his speaking engagements were canceled immediately after 9-11, 35 independent bookstores persisted in hosting scheduled author events with him. “While I sympathize with [Anderson’s], what’s at risk here is the right to think,” he told PW, “The issue here is the defense of the book, of the ideas in a book. Bookstores, universities, libraries should not cave in to threats. It sets a terrible precedent.”
