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Amazingly,
he says Focal Point has been
an exhibitor since
1997.
PW
NewsLine for May 7, 2002
The
Real Shocker Among BEA Exhibitors: David
Irving
AMID all the tongue-clucking about the Heidi
Fleiss booth at BEA[BookExpo
America 2002 in New York], a far more controversial exhibitor seems to have passed through the show undetected.
David Irving comments:
JUST for the record, we at
Focal Point Publications have had a stand at the last five
BookExpos. And the popular Focal
Point posters are in such great demand that we passed out more than 400 during the 3 days; they show Hitler with his ministers and generals and one bears a highly flattering quotation about the original Viking Press edition of the book
Hitler’s
War from none other than Publishers Weekly
(“This massive volume is a model of careful scholarship,
historical objectivity and readability.”)
I guess that slipped through before “the circular” arrived from ADL
headquarters.
The FP stand (total cost with advert: some $10,000) was sandwiched handsomely between the
Encyclopedia Britannica stand and a Digital Mapping company. People came in from all over the
BookExpo, having seen others carrying the poster: schoolteachers asked for several for schoolroom walls, history buffs, students, and journalists asked for them, and a man from
“Newsroom One”, on TV, asked for one for his newsroom wall.
As for the latest edition of
Hitler’s War not explaining what is new, if Mr Zeitchik had turned to the Introduction he would have found a section at the end,
What’s new in the Millennium
Edition. The dustjacket carries the same information. The book is available through amazon.com, and Mr Mark
Levine of Barnes & Noble sent a flunky over to the FP stand, uninvited, to collect copies of both that book and
Goebbels.
Mastermind of the Third
Reich.David Irving, the well-known
Holocaust denier who recently lost a
libel suit in the U.K., exhibited on the show’s lower level under the name of the publisher he runs, Focal Point
Publications. Irving’s company handed out posters of Hitler flanked by two members of the Luftwaffe [sic.
German army]
and promoted the new edition of his book
Hitler’s War. The title has been out for twenty-five years, and the Focal
Point site does not explain how the
new version has been “updated and revised.” Neither Amazon, B&N.com nor
Amazon.co.uk offer the book for sale.
In the BEA guide, Focal Point is listed as producing “primarily WWII histories and biographies of its leaders including
Churchill, Hitler, Goebbels, Goering, Hess and Rommel, written by famous British author David Irving.”
We’re not sure how we missed it, but on page nine of the directory there sits a full-page ad for Focal Point. In it, a picture of Hitler and
Goebbels [sic. Keitel
and Halder] standing in a bookstore accompanies the line “Look Who’s
Back in Your Local Bookstore,” leaving ambiguous the question of whether the
who refers to the Nazis or Irving.
It explains that Hitler’s War has been revised and that Churchill’s
War, “the mighty second volume of
Irving’s best-selling biography” is also now available.
Show manager Greg Topalian said he does not see it as the convention’s job to discriminate on the basis of a book or a publisher’s ideology. “Our position has always been that freedom of speech should reign. You can take exception with a lot of the things on the show floor. It’s up to the booksellers how they want to deal with it.” Amazingly, he says Focal Point has been an exhibitor since 1997.
Irving has been involved in a number of lawsuits over the last few years. In the most high-profile case, he sued academic and Penguin author Deborah Lipstadt
for libel in the U.K., where the threshold for proving such a violation is lower. He lost the case, and now owes Penguin several million pounds in legal fees.
The booth was located near the DC
Comics exhibition area and was also close to several children’s publishers. Topalian said that the convention’s space draw is based entirely on seniority and that the only time show management might intervene would be for reasons of sensitivity — for instance, it might keep a religious publisher separate from a publisher of explicit materials.
He added that while the lower level contained a numbers of children’s houses, it was not designated as a kids-only section.
Despite the potential for controversy,
Topalian said that the presence of
Irving’s company at the show barely caused a ripple. “Actually, we got a lot more comments about Heidi Fleiss,” he said.
Steven Zeitchik
Related items on this website:
Ordering
David Irving’s books | rights
in those books
The
advertisement Look Who’s Back in your
Local Bookstore
