Conference badges are very useful things. When you can't quite remember the name of that person you see at best once a year, the badge can save you from embarrassment. Badges allow vendors to greet potential customers by name and to know where they are from. Badges make it easy to strike up a casual conversation while waiting in line for a book signing or other event. Badges doall of these things, but only if others can read the wearers name.

Badges suspended on lanyards, especially long lanyards, can be impossible to read. There is a 50 percent chance that a badge will be reversed with the wearer's name on the side facing the wearer's belly. Or the lanyard can be so long that the badge hangs so low that, even though the name is facing outward, another can't read it without getting down on bended knee. I can do without the corporate advertising that makes a lanyard badge twice the size it needs to be and makes every conferee a human billboard. But I cannot do without conferees' names being visible.

Whatever the reason, I have overhead a personal financial advisor relentlessly interview a prospective client about personal details such as debt, income, and savings that few of us divulge to family or co-workers. I have overheard job performance appraisal discussions. In one of these a trio of employees from a company conducted a review of a contractor. After opening with small talk over coffee and bagels, the review abruptly shifted to criticism which put the contractor on the defensive.

These discussions differ from the intimacies a couple may exchange in public, whether those be professions of love or a marital spat. They differ from the conversation of friends meeting for lunch or to fete a friend on her birthday. Those sorts of conversations have taken place in public probably since humans developed speech. Business conversations have been conducted in public view for a long time, as well, but generally in more discreet venues than crowded coffee shops and not in others' earshot. Those headphones do more than help me concentrate. Sometimes they create a boundary between the public and private when the latter ought not be public. I really didn't want to listen to a tag team pick to pieces that visibly shaken contractor's work any more than he probably wanted anyone to hear it.

The business decision is not as interesting as its implications for library collections. The gist of the issue is Mahfouz's complaint that the book makes false statements about him. Assume for the sake of argument that this is indeed true. It then follows that any book which contains erroneous statements should be recalled by its publisher and all copies destroyed. Talk about a slippery slope! This would mean the end of presidential candidate autobiographies, to say nothing of a good many books on innumerable topics including dinosaurs and contemporary global climate change. (This gets really tricky since there are certainly two mutually exclusive bodies of fact about global warming.)

In the absence of threatening lawsuits, who would judge which books should be removed from libraries? That question alone proves the folly of CUP's decision. Let us hope it does not become a guiding principle for editorial decisions.