Ron's interesting list of book rankings was rather bizarre.  The inclusion
of the Barrows and Room volume on Amazon's list made me sit up, because I
would dearly have loved to use it in my alcohol history course this
semester.  I had no idea it was still in print.   This made me rush to
amazon.com to check it  out.  There were two identical titles to click on,
each of which gave a wildly different ranking, but included the notation
that the book is indeed out of print!   Perhaps I am being a bit dim, but I
don't see how Amazon can rank its sales, if it cannot obtains copies of the
book to sell!

I must pass on a warning about the book of essays that I have chosen as a
substitute for Barrows and Room this semester, namely the Blocker/Warsh
collection, "The Changing Face of Drink", published by Histoire
Sociale/Social History.  I remember a discussion here a long while back
about the difficulty of obtaining copies of it, but I assumed that
everything had been cleared up by now.  Alas, that is not the case.   We are
now in the ninth week of a sixteen-week semester, and my students and I are
still waiting for the book, ordered in July!   The valiant efforts of my
local bookstore to hurry things up have proven fruitless.   Their  phone
call this week to the publisher got them nowhere, for example, because they
were told that the person dealing with our order only works on Monday
mornings!!   It is rumored that the books were shipped a couple of weeks
ago, but no-one at the publishers knew for sure.  Since I had planned to
assign almost weekly readings from this book, it has disrupted my plans for
the course considerably.   Needless to say, I shall NEVER deal with this
publisher again, and I can only recommend that you do not do so either.

Geoffrey Giles



Professor Geoffrey J. Giles
Department of History, PO Box 117320
University of Florida
Gainesville FL 32611-7320

Office phone: (352)-392-0271
Home phone: (352)-375-3587
Home fax: (352)-379-0935
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