The New York chapter of the Womens National Book Association will host a seminar at the Mercantile Library (17 E. 47th St.) on "dangerous books" tonight starting at 6 p.m. Everybody wants to get behind books that go a bit beyond the conventional, but what do you do when you've got, say, the collected speeches of Osama bin Laden on your next frontlist? That's something Amy Scholder, the general manager of Verso Books, will undoubtedly address during the two-hour presentation. She'll be joined by eroticist Hanne Blank and photographer Barbara Nitke, who know how difficult it can be to get mainstream media to discuss books about sex that aren't published by Judith Regan. Kim Dower talks about what kind of publicity you can generate for yourself, while Kensington's Jeremie Ruby-Strauss reveals how publishers handle hot-button material.

All this, and I hear through the grapevine that the infamous Al Goldstein was trying to score a press pass, so who knows how crazy the Q&A portion could get? If anything could lure me away from tonight's mediabistro.com Book Industry Party, it'd be the prospect of a good shouting match...