Former Regnery publisher Al Regnery—the son of the imprint's founder, and still a member of its board—used his current bully pulpit at The American Spectator to speak out on the authors suing Eagle Publishing for allegedly defrauding them of thousands of dollars in royalties by diverting books to Eagle-owned vendors that generated a royalty rate about 98 percent smaller than that for normal bookstore sales. As far as Regnery is concerned, you'll be unsuprised to learn, it's just "an insigificant lawsuit filed by a handful of disgruntled authors."

Question: If you're an active board member of a company that's being sued, shouldn't somebody have advised you not to shoot your mouth off publicly about that ongoing legal action? Especially if you're going to imply the plaintiffs ought to be grateful they were ever published? "The merits of the lawsuit are hardly worth discussing," Regnery sniffs. "To anyone in the book publishing industry they're laughable." He also raises a point that has come up in the letters some of you have been sending me on the subject, which is that the conditions the plaintiffs find objectionable are, in his opinion, "clear and transparent" in the contracts for their book deals. You've tended to agree with him, although you at least add on the sympathetic perspective that a better agent (or maybe any agent at all) might have made the deal a little less lop-sided.