They censor, I select

Abstract

What happens when a bookseller does not want to stock or sell a specific title? Does this act represent a decision to censor a title? Or, perhaps, does it reflect a bookseller's belief that a book would offend customers (the moral or political argument)? In this article the author explores covert (which he terms an “unspoken ambivalence”) and overt (“we do not carry books of that type”) forms of “title selection” that help perpetuate some forms ofde facto censorship within the bookselling community.