Screening the First Amendment: ABFFE Debuts Bookstore Videos at Luncheon

ABFFE President Chris Finan addresses booksellers at the Thursday lunch focusing on First Amendment issues.

Oren Teicher, ABA COO -- and the founding president of the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression (ABFFE) -- welcomed booksellers to Thursday's ABFFE Lunch by advising the audience not to take freedom of expression and First Amendment rights for granted. He spoke of ABFFE's 17-year history and its continuing relevance, thanks to the participation of booksellers and current ABFFE President Chris Finan.

Finan noted that when he began at ABFFE in 1998, "Oren told me that it was important to keep the issues in front of booksellers who have limited time." With tongue firmly in cheek, he noted that, in the subsequent years, he had been "blessed" with a wealth of privacy and free expression issues, including Ken Starr's inquest into Monica Lewinsky's bookstore records, the Tattered Cover's legal case to protect reader privacy, and the encroachments on First Amendment rights following passage of the USA Patriot Act. Looking ahead, Finan mentioned new ABFFE initiatives, including fundraising, which at the show includes the organization's Silent Auction and sales of its BookExpo America souvenir T-shirts.

The audience then turned to the screens for ABFFE's new production, Scenes From a Bookstore: Free Speech Vignettes, produced by Kerry Slattery of Skylight Books in Los Angeles. With considerable humor and a healthy dose of hyperbole, the film portrayed several serious issues involving censorship--complaints by parents when their children purchase "inappropriate" materials; criticism from political minorities that certain books are censored by either not stocking or hiding them; and threats to customer privacy when authorities, or others, ask booksellers for customer records.

The lunch's format was designed to allow booksellers at their tables to discuss the scenarios shown in each film and to brainstorm about possible alternative responses. Betsy Burton of The King's English in Salt Lake City, Utah, moderated a lively exchange, in which booksellers agreed that stores need to be prepared for these sorts of in-store conflicts and to have policies in place before complaints arise. For instance, Sherri Gallentine of Vroman's in Pasadena, California, suggested that a parent who complains about offensive materials sold to her son should be given a refund, and that a bookseller might say, "I completely understand. Let's go a find a book together--on us."

Mary Yockey of Anderson's Bookshop in Naperville, Illinois, said, "Thanks to all the education that ABFFE has done, I feel we're prepared for these situations. I wouldn't have known what to do previously." She mentioned how effective it was to have scenarios, "to prepare ahead of time and not do it cold."

Several booksellers mentioned wanting to use the film vignettes for staff training. Finan told BTW that ABFFE was exploring ways to disseminate the production by sending stores DVDs upon request, and possibly posting it on the ABFFE, BookWeb, or YouTube websites. --Nomi Schwartz