(Tommy) Robinsons

WOOF. Susanne Horman is the owner of Robinsons, an independent bookstore chain in Victoria, who has some clearly… interesting opinions about some of the books she sells. She tweeted the above guff about five weeks ago but it seems to have only started circulating yesterday, I got the above screenshot from Reddit; perhaps unsurprisingly Susanne’s deleted her Twitter and the company posted an apology on Facebook, which, because they’re obviously cowards, they closed comments on, so I’m responding here. This was their apology:

And this is my response:

Now, that was a screenshot of Susanne’s tweets. I obviously can’t confirm 100% if she’s deleted her Twitter, but it’s an image. It’s not just a text transcription. If they’ve been “edited by individuals” and taken out of context, 1) how and 2) what the hell context was that going to sound good in? She’s tried restating it, though to be honest I’m not sure she made it sound better:

Horman said her buying team at Robinsons have noticed publishers were releasing an overflow of similar books with “little variation of themes” in the past two to three years, which has caused what she described as an “imbalance” in the market.
“For one reason or another, we have various categories of books not being written or published in sufficient quantities to meet customer demand,” Horman said. “Some genres are overflowing on our shelves and others are noticeably bare. Positive stories with men and boys as the hero are almost missing from the mix.”

Look, I’m not an expert in the book trade so I don’t know all what books are in fact out there, but I’m sure SOMEONE must be writing books like that, and Susanne isn’t looking hard enough. And it’s not just this perceived lack of positive male hero stories that’s her problem, clearly, when you look at what else she said in her tweets. Other family arrangements, disability, queerness, indigenousness… these things are bad too, apparently, despite being, you know, the daily reality for a lot of kids out there (I am particularly struck personally by the disability thing, of course). Did a non-binary Koori person from a single parent household run over Susanne’s foot with their wheelchair or something?

Susanne’s tweets may not represent the views of Robinsons, but they evidently DO represent the owner of the business, who is clearly unhappy about some of the stuff she’s selling (though she should be happy that professional racist and gay homophobe Douglas Murray is one of Robinsons’ best-selling non-fiction writers) and wants more books about straight, white, able-bodied people in traditional families. Which, you know, she has the right to sell that sort of stuff if she wants. It’s just that she could’ve done that without looking like a complete arseclown on social media. Not saying the quiet bits out loud is usually the best move…