Thanks to Larry Portzline for passing along a story from Vermont’s Middlebury College about a trustee’s attempt to intimidate a local indie bookstore. Basically, Becky Dayton of the Vermont Book Shop was selling little boxes of mints with a caricature of President Bush, with names like indictmints, impeachmints, and embarrassmints, and board of trustees chair Frederick Fritz got all upset.
“According to Becky, Mr. Fritz claimed that bookstores are held to higher standards, that they are a higher class of retailer that promotes the free exchange of ideas. In short, an independent bookstore is no place for a political statement (even if in a box of mints). Flawed logic aside, he spoke in such a way as if he were entitled to dictate what she or any town merchant should be able to sell. Becky spent the rest of the day deeply shaken.”
An article in the campus newspaper from a senior who works at the shop labels this incident, if it took place as described, as “unacceptable,” and quite properly observes, “If Mr. Fritz actually cared for a politics-free bookshop, one would think that mints would be the last place to start. In fact, in his vision of a bookshop, I think we’d have to pull books from the shelf until the bookshop had no books at all, and would be stocked only with sunflowers and lollipops.”