Remember last Friday's item about the rumors that some shoppers were having trouble finding The Jewel of Medina in their local chain bookstores? Book Chase blogger Sam Houston had an equally hard time locating the book at Barnes & Noble. Some of that was his own fault, he admits, since he started out by looking for a trade paperback instead of a hardcover—but then things got interesting:

"The employee I approached for help seemed to know nothing at all about the book's history but, as he looked it up in the computer system, I filled him in a bit and it seemed to ring a bell. He said there should be one copy on the shelf and more in the back and, as we walked back to the J-section of the store, he speculated that this must be the book of which his District Manager strongly suggested only one copy be placed on display at-a-time."

Houston adds that he was told by this employee that, at least in his neck of the woods (which happens to be Houston, Texas), for the sake of "bookseller safety" the policy is that "no attention will be drawn to the book, that it will be displayed on the appropriate part of the fiction shelves spine-out so that the cover art catches no one's eye, and that replacement copies will be put on the shelf only if someone happens to notice that a copy has sold despite all the obstacles against anyone actually spotting the book." (We're assuming that last bit of sarcasm is Houston's interpolation.)

We'll look into this and see if anything else turns up—in the meantime, by way of contrast, commenters to the original post inform us that at least some Borders outlets have been putting the controversial novel front and center.