Booksteve Bookseller Stories--Weird Books and the FBI

The weirdest books I ever saw come through our stores were a series of German photography books that featured real corpses posed in pleasant little tableaus, often depicting scenes from fairy tales as I recall. Surreal, but truly shocking and disgusting. I just wrote a few descriptions from memory but deleted them to spare you the images in your head. As bad as you might think they were, they were worse. Some guy special-ordered one and bought it. That’s when we found out there was an entire series of them and he ordered the rest, one by one. Years later, someone was arrested in Cincinnati for attempting to do that exact same type of photography in the City Morgue. I’ve always wondered…

Another WTF volume was a $60 coffee table photo book we stocked at Barnes and Noble which featured nothing but crystal clear closeup color car crash photos, complete with fresh bloody corpses. Presumably, these were police photos. How anyone got permission to publish them like they were flower arrangements or something is beyond me. 

It was always company policy that we could never even order the infamous TURNER DIARIES book but we did find ourselves often ordering THE ANARCHIST COOKBOOK for customers. For those unfamiliar with it, here is a description from Wikipedia: “The Anarchist Cookbook, first published in 1971, is a book that contains instructions for the manufacture of explosives, rudimentary telecommunications phreaking devices, and related weapons, as well as instructions for home manufacturing of illicit drugs, including LSD.” As I recall, It also has an actual recipe for marijuana meatballs. 

Anyway, company policy was that it’s not our business what anyone wants to read. Some of those ordering the book were police officers, who needed it for work. Others—like most of us booksellers—were likely curious as to what all the fuss was about. The FBI, however, were curious for completely different reasons. 

One day in the early 1990s—pre-Patriot Act—at the Florence Mall store, two Men-in-Black-style FBI men, complete with dark glasses indoors, asked to speak to the Manager. Brenda was off. I told them I was the MOD. They calmly but forcefully demanded to see all of our records with names and addresses of every customer who had ever ordered THE ANARCHIST COOKBOOK. I began sweating and shaking and stammered out an explanation that I couldn’t do that as company policy was that customers had the right to order whatever they wanted as long as it was not in and of itself illegal. 

They began to guilt me, bringing up various then-recent bombings on the national scene and quoting me statistics on the loss of life. I tried to tell them that we’ve had police officers order the book to help find out about how to stop such things. They then said they wanted those police officers’ names. 

I was scared half to death. On the one hand, they were right that people who ordered bomb-making books might seriously be planning to make bombs. On the other hand I was a strong believer in the right to read anything you please, for whatever reason, and that the government didn’t have the right to demand that information.

I gave them the phone number for Waldenbooks’ Legal Department and they left, saying they would return with a court order for the info they wanted.

After they left, I was quickly on the phone with the Legal Department myself, where I was thanked for standing up to them. The Legal Department said that they were likely phishing (although that term was not yet in widespread use) and, without any specific current need for those names and addresses, would probably not have been able to get a warrant or a court order. I think I hid in the back room most of the rest of that day. We never head from them again regarding THE ANARCHIST COOKBOOK although it was later added and then dropped from the Do Not Special Order list several times