A gay man tries to buy a book
Are Waterstones staff trying to cover up a medical scandal?
I made this request on Twitter yesterday.
A subscriber wrote back with his experiences.
Dear Graham,
This is in response to your request on Twitter about experiences of trying to buy Hannah Barnes’ book ’Time to Think’ in Waterstones. I have been avidly following you and many others for several months now, and I do have Dennis Noel Kavanagh’s exhortations for gay men to speak up increasingly prodding my conscience.
Anyway, my experience in trying to buy the book confirms for me that Waterstones is deliberately not stocking/advertising/selling it.
I was going to buy it online, but decided to get it in a shop - partly to be seen to be buying it.
So on Tuesday last week (28 Feb), I looked for ‘Time to think’ in Waterstones Broadgate (Liverpool Street station). I was told that they had one copy, but that it had been ordered specifically for a customer. I was told that the nearest branch with a copy was Gower Street. (I didn’t look there…)
On Friday (3 Feb) I looked in Waterstones Piccadilly - the biggest bookshop in London - where the front section as you enter is full of new releases and recommended books.
I couldn’t see it on show; there was a big pile of Munroe Bergdorf’s book with a recommendation… so my suspicions were growing that this was deliberate. I asked an assistant at the checkout if it was in stock.
The assistant (female in her mid/late 20s ) said ‘oh, we’ve had a lot of enquiries about that’, and ‘that’s the one about…’ struggling to to describe it. I said ‘it’s about a medical scandal at the Tavistock Clinic written by a Newsnight journalist’. After a couple of tries, the assistant eventually settled on ‘it’s about gender studies isn’t it?’.
I added, ‘I’m surprised that it’s not out front as it was released ten days ago and has been all over the media’.
At this point, a second assistant (a young man in his early 30s) interjected quite sharply, that it had been in stock but it had sold out. His tone and abrupt demeanour strengthened my suspicions of an unwillingness to either stock or display the book.
Meanwhile, the assistant I originally spoke to was looking it up and said it’s on order, but (unusually?) didn’t suggest when it would be in stock. When I asked, she said “a week maybe…”
I then went to Foyles on Charing Cross Road (Foyles is now owned by Waterstones btw), who also didn’t have it on display in the front of the shop along with the new releases and recommendations. The assistant there said they had sold their allocation and were waiting for more copies, but again didn’t offer when it would be in stock. He looked up to see where I might find it nearby, and said that Waterstones Trafalgar Square had a copy.
I couldn’t see it in Waterstones Trafalgar Square either, despite there being a two-unit display headed ‘In the media’. When I asked, I was told that I could find it in the ‘New social sciences’ section.
I found it and bought it. That might have been the last copy in a Waterstones store in London (!).
Postscript: this morning (6 Mar) I looked in Waterstones Covent Garden; not in stock there either. The assistant looked it up and told me that there was one copy in the Trafalgar Square store. I suspected that was the copy I bought on Friday; and indeed I went to have a look and there was still a gap on the shelf from which I had taken the book on Friday afternoon.
So for me, it seems obvious that this is a deliberate action by Waterstones to suppress sales of the book. I guess Swift Press probably knows this already, but doesn’t want to get involved for commercial reasons (distribution of other/future books…).
FYI I’m a gay man in my mid 60s; ‘out’ since the very early 80s, and once an ‘activist’ to the extent that I was involved with THT and several similar charities in the 80s/90s either as an employee or a trustee.
Best
A
Quelle surprise.
At a very basic level this is poor business practice.
For two years during the pandemic I passed our local Waterstones which showed the Shon Faye book somewhere in the window. During that time several very successful feminist books were published yet not once were they displayed. I stopped buying from Waterstones then and I’ll never buy from them again.