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THE BOOKSELLERS’ REVOLT  
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Maththew Patin / The Texas Observer
March 11, 2024
The Texas Observer
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_ The READER Act would have required vendors to rate books on
"explicitness" before selling to schools—and blacklisted those that
didn't comply. _

“The Book Hunters,” a colored illustration for Collier’s
magazine by Gordon Grant (1909) Public Domain, Gordon Grant

 

* This article was originally published by the _Texas Observer_, a
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January 17 was a big day for opponents of book bans in Texas schools.
Charley Rejsek, CEO of indie bookstore BookPeople, had just returned
home from a routine meeting at the Austin Central Library. She opened
her email and screamed with joy: The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals
had ruled in her favor in _BookPeople v. Wong_, a challenge to
Texas’ Restricting Explicit and Adult-Designated Educational
Resources (READER) Act. 

“READER had felt like a death sentence,” Rejsek said. “With the
ruling, BookPeople and all book vendors can continue to service school
districts the way they always have. … The judges agreed with the
unconstitutionality of the law as written. That’s validating.” 

The decision came in the nick of time: Signed into law in June 2023,
the READER Ac
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would have barred booksellers from conducting business with Texas’
K–12 libraries if they hadn’t first identified whether the books
they were selling were “sexually explicit,” “sexually
graphic,” or had “no rating.” By April 1, booksellers would have
also had to identify every explicit book they had ever sold to any
Texas school district that was still “in active use” by that
district. Vendors were to submit these ratings to the Texas Education
Agency (TEA), which could override them. Noncompliance ran the risk of
placement on a list of unapproved vendors. Many bookstores derive
significant income from school sales, and the thin-margin and often
resource-strapped indies incapable of complying would have had to
rethink their businesses, if not shutter entirely. 

Opponents of the law, which was coauthored by state Representative
Jared Patterson, of Frisco, lambasted it as a draconian effort to
censor primarily LGBTQ+ authors, characters, and subjects. READER
would harm booksellers’ bottom line, its terms were
unconstitutionally vague, and forcing vendors to rate books is
compelled speech, critics said.

To the relief of booksellers and freedom-to-read advocates, the 5th
Circuit—often considered one of the nation’s most
conservative—upheld a lower court’s temporary injunction against
the ratings mandate, finding that it would harm vendors economically
and constituted compelled speech. 

“We are not persuaded by the State’s characterization of the
ratings as a ‘form of consistency review’ that is a ‘purely
ministerial task’ instead of an expression of the vendors’ opinion
on the subject matter being rated,” the opinion read. “[This]
statute requires vendors to undertake a fact-intensive process of
weighing and balancing factors to rate library material. This process
is highly discretionary and is neither precise nor certain.”

Soon after the decision, Patterson called on Attorney General Ken
Paxton to appeal the decision to the Supreme Court. Texas has 75 days
from February 1 to do so. Plaintiffs could seek a decision from the
district court to make the temporary injunction upheld by the 5th
Circuit permanent, but had not settled on a course of action as of
press time. 

Texas has a long history of book censorship dating back to the
McCarthy era, the publication of Henry Miller’s _Tropic of
Capricorn_ mid-century, and several Daughters of the Republic battles
against both “obscene” dictionary entries and critical views of
Texas history in the 1960s. But aside from a short-lived crusade
against Harry Potter’s witchy influence in the late ’90s and early
aughts, the conversation around books—and possible legislative
policing—had been tame since the 1980s. That shifted near the turn
of this decade. 

A literary hysteria started brewing at least as early as 2021. In July
of that year, the Texas State Preservation Board—a body helmed by
Governor Greg Abbott and Lieutenant Governor Dan
Patrick—unilaterally canceled a Writers’ League of Texas event at
the Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum that would have featured
the authors of _Forget the Alamo_, a book critical of the state’s
origin story. 

“As a member of the Preservation Board, I told staff to cancel this
event as soon as I found out about it,” Patrick wrote on X, formerly
Twitter. “This fact-free rewriting of TX history has no place [at
the museum].”

“Librarians are being harassed in private Facebook groups. They’re
receiving pressure from within and outside the school.”

In October, state Representative Matt Krause disseminated a list of
850 books
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he wanted public school districts to review “for the welfare and
protection of state citizens.” The list prompted one district to
pull at least 125 titles. In March 2022, Llano County officials fired
a librarian who refused to remove materials deemed objectionable by a
group of people who said some of the library’s books—including one
featuring a transgender teen—were “inappropriate” or
“pornographic.”

Few, however, have been under siege like the state’s public school
librarians.

A report from PEN America, a longstanding free speech advocacy group
that has tracked book challenges since 2021, paints a grim picture.
During the 2021–2022 school year, parents, educators,
administrators, board members, or legislators challenged more than
1,500 books that were either included in curricula or placed in school
libraries in districts across the country. A sizable number of those
books contained “protagonists or prominent secondary characters of
color,” according to the report, or addressed LGBTQ+ themes. A
quarter of the challenges involved books having “sexual content of
varying kinds,” though much of this was age-appropriate material
about puberty or relationships. More than 800 of the total challenges
PEN indexed in 2021–2022 originated in Texas. In the 2019–2020
school year, that number was 17, according to the Texas ACLU’s own
figure.

Texas’ school librarians didn’t need a report to tell them they
were being targeted. 

“[Librarians] are being harassed in private Facebook groups,” said
veteran Texas librarian Carolyn Foote, who in 2021 founded #FReadom
Fighters, an advocacy group. “They’re receiving pressure from
within [and outside] the school, and they’re really just trying to
comply with . . . the standards for library operations that have been
around for so long.”

The standards she refers to are decades-long best practices laid out
by the American Library Association and similar groups that
incorporated guidelines about  books deemed “obscene” by courts.
The same guidelines have also long encouraged community and family
involvement in library collections. But the reason school librarians
now “operate from a place of fear,” as Foote put it, stems from a
change in the culture. 

“A [Trump] presidency where anything goes as far as the way you
treat people with differing ideas . . .  created this climate where
people felt more aggrieved and more permitted to act however they
wanted, with no sort of social norms,” Foote said.

Foote said that greater diversity—and openness about diversity—has
stoked fear among many Texans. In recent years, the state’s
decision-makers have crusaded against everything from drag shows and
diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs at universities to the
teaching of Texas history. The “Texas 1836 Project,” for
instance—its title based on the New York Times’s 1619 Project,
which stressed the role of slavery in America’s founding—was
established by legislators in 2021 to “never forget why Texas became
so exceptional in the first place.” 

Another reason: a vocal minority with the power to drum up fear. Far
fewer people increasingly account for a far greater number of
challenges. The _Washington Post_ found that of 1,000 nationwide book
challenges, 60 percent had been filed by a mere 11 people. Lawmakers
have also taken the lead in censoring books: PEN’s 2021–2022
report noted that more than 40 percent of challenged titles that
school year were “tied to directives from state officials or elected
lawmakers to investigate or remove books in schools.”

Something else had changed, too: Historically, book challenges were
quiet, deliberate, local affairs, involving formal procedures and
committee reviews. Books suspected to be objectionable remained on
shelves until a final decision. Now, challenges that lead to books
being pulled are quick, loud, ideologically driven, and often centered
on select passages divorced from context. Many books are being yanked
from shelves immediately upon being challenged.

The road to meddling in private booksellers’ affairs began in August
2022, when Patterson boasted of having challenged 32 books in his home
school district of Frisco due to “obscene content,” but lamented
that the responsibility had fallen on state officials.

“National ratings groups, publishers, and book vendors . . .
continue to highly rate, award and promote graphically explicit
content produced in recent years,” he said in a statement.

Six months later, Patterson would up the ante.

The first draft of House Bill 900
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tendentiously named Restricting Explicit and Adult-Designated
Educational Resources, or READER, Act—was introduced in March 2023.
Coauthored by Patterson, READER outlined two separate but related
provisions. The first instructed the Texas State Library and Archives
Commission (TSLAC) to adopt “standards for school library collection
development that a school district shall adhere to in developing or
implementing the district’s library collection development
policies” by January 1, 2024. Standards included recognizing
parental involvement in curation, providing transparency into school
libraries’ current catalogs, outlining and publicizing
district-level book-challenge-review processes, and barring books
deemed patently obscene and age-inappropriate based on longstanding
precedent. 

The second component compelled booksellers to rate “sexually
explicit” or “sexually relevant” titles that they had previously
sold to public K–12 schools and submit a list of those titles to the
TEA. The overlap between these two primary components was the
bookseller ratings—librarians were to refer to them when developing
their collections. 

Lawmakers were convinced that the law would banish “any
communication, language, or material, including a written description,
illustration, photographic image, video image, or audio file, other
than library material directly related to the curriculum . . . that
describes, depicts, or portrays sexual conduct . . . in a way that is
patently offensive” from school libraries.

The law was to take effect September 1, 2023, and vendors were
expected to submit their first rounds of ratings by April 1. Those
ratings—or a notice of vendors’ failure to proffer them—would
afterward be posted in a “conspicuous place” on the Texas
Education Agency’s website. 

The state’s leading librarians and their advocates were, if not
thrilled, at least more sanguine about many of Texas’s statewide
standards for developing their collections. Though READER would have
marked the first time the state had codified such standards statewide,
many of the bill’s goals were familiar, already de rigueur to
experienced librarians.  

But advocates feared that the primacy READER placed on parental
involvement would lead families to believe they were newly armed with
rights they had already possessed, leading to further and more
uninformed assaults on beleaguered librarians. What’s more, though
the bill’s insistence that districts clarify challenge-review
processes sounded fine on paper, those processes—formerly
collaborative and orderly—might easily be revised by ideologically
driven decision-makers.

But most troublesome to advocates was the ratings regime READER
established, which required school librarians to ban any book that
vendors had rated as explicit—or, more accurately, the books the TEA
considered as such. Librarians recognized, too, what booksellers knew
as a matter of fact: Rating thousands of books would be highly
subjective and time-consuming. 

BookPeople’s Charley Rejsek knew something was cooking in the Lege
in early 2023. A fellow Texas bookseller had alerted her to one of the
39 library regulation bills introduced that year—a nearly tenfold
increase beyond the usual number. It was not until March 7, however,
when Patterson filed HB 900, that the stakes were immediately clear.

“The goal [with HB 900] was to put this workload onto bookstores,”
Rejsek said. “It’s so impractical.”

Rejsek has been a bookseller for more than 25 years. I first met her
in 2017, when she was serving as the logistics and volunteer
coordinator at Texas Book Festival. Three years later, she was named
BookPeople’s new CEO. Soon after, her duties ballooned beyond the
managerial. 

“I did not think that this would ever be something I would have to
do on behalf of booksellers,” she told me, “but I also knew that
the bill wasn’t feasible. … I had no choice. It’s my job [as] a
bookseller to say why it’s not going to work.”

A substantial portion of BookPeople’s business is made up of school
sales, and the burden of READER’s ratings system was untenable.
Rejsek took the issue up with the education committee as well as House
Speaker Dade Phelan. 

“We went to everyone we could think of,” Rejsek said. “We went
in person; we emailed them; we [showed them how] we would never be
able to comply.”

The shops I spoke with could barely begin to wrap their heads around
READER’s potential impact on their operations and bottom lines. Will
Evans, founder of Deep Vellum Bookstore in Dallas, characterized the
bill as “ill-conceived and hateful to its core.” While his shop
doesn’t rely on school sales to the same degree as others, the new
law would change how the store functions. 

“It would hurt our business,” he told me. “Would we have to cut
employees? Probably.”

Randi Null, the general manager of Houston’s Brazos Bookstore,
explained that because so much of her shop’s marketing efforts are
tied to school-sponsored book fairs, author visits, and classroom
libraries, the financial loss stemming from READER would be
devastating. She was sure of at least one thing, however: The Brazos
employee charged with purchasing children’s books for the store
would quit under the weight of it all.

In May 2023, weeks after the House had given HB 900 the thumbs-up,
Rejsek testified before the Texas Senate Committee on Education.
READER had yet to pass the Senate, and she was trying once more to
convince lawmakers. 

“This bill would require us to retroactively report every book ever
purchased from us at the bookstore registers, or at a festival, or an
author event, or any other public setting that may have been brought
for circulation into a school,” she said, her voice trembling.
“This is not possible. We have never been required to keep these
records, and we do not have a way to create them. Due to the lack of
records, it would be impossible for us to rate all books we may have
sold that are in active circulation after 52 years of business.”

After Rejsek spoke, a BookPeople colleague painted a picture of a new
and near-Orwellian day-to-day: “This could mean entry-level cashiers
asking every customer in the store the intended purpose of their
purchase, evaluating, questioning, and tracking it.”

If small booksellers incapable of READER compliance were cut out, only
a few big players would remain to satisfy school libraries’
collection needs. The fewer the players, the simpler it would be for
the state to manage and dictate the terms of lucrative and massive
bulk-order book buys with those mega vendors willing to dispense with
principle and play the game. The result: an ever narrower catalog of
government-approved books channeled into school libraries.

Speculation and fear were all that Texas’ booksellers had left.
Despite Rejsek’s plea, the Senate stamped READER with approval two
weeks after her testimony, and Abbott signed it into law that June.

Though officially READER wouldn’t take effect until September, the
Houston area’s Katy Independent School District—having already
dictated that students must have parents’ permission before checking
out any book at its school libraries—decided in a preemptive huff to
halt all new book purchases. 

With the die cast, TSLAC had little choice but to begin drafting new
collection-development standards for Texas’s K–12 schools. The
state’s booksellers, for their part, could do little. But Rejsek
wouldn’t throw in the towel. 

In late July, BookPeople joined forces with Valerie Koehler of
Houston’s Blue Willow Bookshop as well as the Association of
American Publishers, the Author’s Guild, the American Booksellers
Association, and other national organizations in filing suit against
the state over the READER Act. 

Amicus briefs supporting the plaintiffs illuminated READER’s
economic impact on booksellers. Blue Willow, for instance, derived 20
percent of its sales from school-related functions and, with total
annual revenue just north of $1 million, might have to shutter if
compelled to rate every book they’d already sold to schools.
Compliance would cost them between $200 and $1,000 per book for a
total between $4 million and $500 million. 

On September 19, in a scathing 59-page opinion, U.S. District Judge
Alan Albright wrote, “READER’s requirements for vendors are so
numerous and onerous as to call into question whether the legislature
believed any third party could possibly comply.”

Albright halted the enforcement of READER’s bookseller ratings while
leaving TSLAC’s school library collection-development standards
intact. A week after the judge’s ruling, Texas appealed the decision
to the U.S. 5th Circuit, which—in a temporary win for the
state—denied Albright’s injunction and expedited a schedule for
oral arguments. Meantime, the state could proceed as planned. 

At oral arguments in November, Laura Lee Prather, the plaintiffs’
lead attorney, outlined the consequences of a READER future.  

“It is important to stress that unless the injunction is continued
and the administrative stay is lifted, irreparable injury in the form
of lost First Amendment rights will ensue,” Prather said. “In the
absence of an injunction, the financial, reputational, and
constitutional effects of the required ratings will be irreversible.
Even if HB 900 is ultimately overturned, this bell cannot be
unrung.”

In January, after the 5th Circuit at last ruled in BookPeople’s
favor, I asked a relieved Charley Rejsek about what her attorney had
said.

“I hope that we stopped it early enough,” she said, “so that if
there were any damage, it could be undone.” 

“Once your name is on a website with ratings that you don’t agree
with,” she went on, “you can’t take it back.”

In an X post, State Republican Executive Committee member Christin
Bentley—long an outspoken proponent of READER—decried the triumph
of the “groomers” and assured everyone, “In the months leading
up to the 89th Texas Legislative Session, we have good work ahead of
us and a clear path ahead.” 

She signed off: “The enemy would have you defeated and discouraged.
Don’t be! The enemy is a liar! Victory is the Lord’s!”

“There is a climate of fear and uncertainty, and librarians feel
like their jobs are being threatened.”

Like Bentley, Patterson looked forward to new opportunities to stick
it to booksellers: “In the meantime, [I] look forward on how Texas
can improve vendor accountability with other legislative solutions
next session,” he said.

Rejsek’s attention turned to librarians. The vendors had secured a
victory, but “the librarians are still fighting.” 

Though a win for booksellers, the 5th Circuit’s ruling had indeed
sidelined the library standards portion of HB 900, just as the
district court had. 

“Only the rating system affects Plaintiffs,” the circuit court’s
opinion read, and “the library standards are not at issue on
appeal.”

The Texas Library Association (TLA) lauded the appeals court’s
decision but lamented the standards left in place.

“There’s really just a lot of uncertainty [now],” the TLA’s
Shirley Robinson told me. 

Carolyn Foote for #FReadom Fighters agreed: “[The new standards are]
creating a lot of confusion,” she said. Because TSLAC’s recently
adopted standards included the now-defunct provisions about vendor
ratings, they were “impossible to comply with.”

Whatever the ultimate outcome of the legislative and legal wrangling,
READER has already had a chilling effect on school libraries and
librarians who censor themselves to avoid trouble. 

“There is a climate of fear and uncertainty, and librarians feel
like their jobs are being threatened,” Robinson said. “They are
responding in ways that may even be contrary to their training and not
ordering certain books or [shelving them] because they’re afraid of
who’s going to walk into the library and turn something into a
weapon against them.”

I asked Rejsek, who in December was named, along with Blue Willow
Bookshop’s Koehler, as Publishers Weekly’s person of the year in
recognition of their stands against book banning, what to make of the
future.

“I think this is just the beginning,” Rejsek said. “All over the
country, they’re throwing something at the wall, and they’re
getting it into the courts, and they’re seeing what sticks.”

“It’s a really scary time,” Robinson added.

_The TEXAS OBSERVER is a progressive nonprofit news outlet and print
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