According to Beth Bingham, a spokesperson for Borders bookstores, the decision not to stock the April/May issue of Free Inquiry was made out of concern for customer safety. The issue contained four of the 12 controversial "cartoons" of the prophet Muhammad and commentaries written by me and an Islamic dissident, Ibn Warraq.

Few people know that Borders Books and Music, a vine, not a chain, that now extends from North America to southern Europe, existed as a solitary college bookseller in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1982-a University of Michigan tradition that prided itself on the quality and variety of its stock and the willingness to take risks that no other bookstore would take.

When I was a young assistant professor at U. of M., shopping at Borders was a lunchtime delight-the antithesis of the depressing chain-sameness that already trademarked outlets like Walden (now Borders's adopted child) and B. Dalton. In Borders, you could read out-of-the-way translations of Xenophon, radical theology, buy the latest copy of Dissent or Mother Jones, sit in Windsor chairs, talk to friends (or ignore them), and buy art reproductions upstairs for five dollars-from what seemed an bottomless bin of choices.

I thought I had arrived, academically speaking, when in 1987, Borders stocked my first Oxford University Press title without so much as being asked-a translation and commentary on the anti-Christian polemicist, Celsus. That's the sort of place Borders used to be. Borders stocked for the "serious reader" who wanted to be challenged, informed, or offended. In 1983, you would have starved trying to find "devotional" or "inspirational" titles or schlock offerings in Christian spirituality, self-improvement, Christian living, and New Age theosophy. And yet, wandering through Borders in Ithaca, New York, only yesterday, I found (only an estimate) five feet of shelf space devoted to the squishiest of squishy titles in religion for every one foot devoted to books that could actually teach the browser something useful, critical, informative-rather than reinforce the religious sensibilities he brought with him to the browse.

Borders has learned what sells. It is, according to its Web site, "a Fortune 500 company with annual sales of $3.9 billion." It has learned all about the world outside Ann Arbor. It knows that The Da Vinci Code has become a cult, that Mary Magdelene (and anything written about her, true or false) is one hot bitch, and that Lee Strobel (The Case for Christ) and Ted Haggard (The Jerusalem Diet), who claims the allegiance of the 30,000,000-member-strong New Life Christian Evangelical alliance, are worth the space. Presumably that's why six feet of shelf space can be devoted to manga comics for 'tween-agers and not a foot can be found for Free Inquiry.

(Note: To view an expanded version of this article, published by Religion News Service on April 3, 2006, please visit www.religionnews.com.)

R. Joseph Hoffmann is Chair of the Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion at the Center for Inquiry.