Jennifer Riest of Regnery Publishing was surprised, to say the least, when she spoke this summer to a distressed shopper from Norman, Okla. Why, the customer asked, had Regnery “given in to White House pressure” and stopped the presses on Unlimited Access, Gary Aldrich’s account of working as an FBI agent inside the Clinton White House?
The book is the bestselling title in the firm’s history, and it was printing copies as quickly as it could. Where, Riest asked, had the gentleman from Norman gotten that idea? From a store clerk, he explained, who told him that Regnery had given up on the Aldrich book because it was “a pack of lies.” Riest’s colleague, Ileana Gonzalez, said she received at least a call a day from customers distraught that the “White House had forced the publisher to stop shipment” of Unlimited Access. One customer called the publisher when a store clerk tried to talk her into buying Bob Woodward’s The Choice rather than the Aldrich title. “It takes a lot for a person to go through the trouble of calling a publisher,” Gonzalez said. So why are they calling? “It is often very hard to get ahold of this book.”
