Some readers were curious about the way I handled yesterday’s item on the books you couldn’t buy at the Met’s gift shop, and why I didn’t push the “Is the Met banning books?” angle that was implied but abandoned in the original Times coverage, then obscured by ancillary details in the Sun followup. The short answer is that I’m not inclined to see a bookstore’s refusal to stock an individual title as an act of censorship. I have a very narrow view of what constitutes a genuine First Amendment violation, and a bookstore’s seeing fit not to stock a given book just doesn’t meet my standard.
Do I question the wisdom of the original decision not to put The Clarks of Cooperstown on the Met’s gift shop shelves during the special exhibition of paintings from the Clark collection? Sure. But I’d question it as a matter of sensible business practice, not as a matter of “censorship” or “book banning,” and even then there’s a legitimate face-value explanation for their action: Instead of offering a diverse range of materials on the subject, the Met wanted to pimp its own book. I don’t think anybody outside the Met would disagree such narrow selection constitutes a likely disservice to the museum’s patrons, but I still don’t see that any author’s rights were violated in the process. (That said, if the Museum of the Moving Image were running a ’70s film retrospective and didn’t carry The Stewardess Is Flying the Plane!, I imagine I’d want to know why the heck not.)