BY: BOOKMANS

Exercise your freedom to choose - which store has YOUR favorite Fight Censorship 2007 display? See the pictures and cast your vote now! This year you're helping us pick our winner.

>>See this year's Fight Censorship in-store displays and vote for your favorite in the Forum!<<

Poll is open until Oct 6!

Read more about Fight Censorship 2007.

Ever year, the creative minds behind Bookmans' in-store displays - known as Visual Merchandisers - compete for best Fight Censorship presentation. This year we're asking YOU to help choose the winner.

Each store received the same signs to use in their displays; where the VMs went from there was up to their own imagination and ingenuity. Vote for the store you feel best captures this year's theme: Censorship Limits Your Options. Protect Your Freedom To Choose.

The poll's results will be a major factor in determining the winner. Take a look at this year's displays, and then cast your vote over on the Forum. You must be a registered member of the Forum to vote. Register here!

Taking the poll's results into account, members of the Bookmans staff will also be judging this year's displays on their use of this year's theme, visual impact, and how displays are incorporated throughout the store.

Here's what our VMs had to say about their inspiration this year:

Kelly K: Fighting censorship is so important because it's what makes this country great. We have a tendency to take for granted that we can read whatever book we want, without thinking that there's people who can't. We need to fight for those people!

Kris S: I feel any treatment of censorship, especially for the public, ought to be about education. [Fighting censorship] ought to be about educating the very people who might discover a book in the library they don't personally agree with...and who need to remember other people's opinions, tastes, and especially rights, count, too.

Frank S: ...Censoring and banning are self-defeating prospects ...Censoring or banning things does not make them go away. Many customers will say, "Why would anyone want to ban this book? I love it." Or "I read this when I was a kid. What could cause this book to be banned?" Sometimes they get angry. Sometimes they are just confused. But, in either case, they are thinking about the topic. 

Elaine S: How aware is the public of the variety of information that is censored? Or the plethora of motivations behind movements to ban or censor? It seems to me that it all boils down to taste, of which there is no accounting. People like what they like and usually have strong opinions about what they don't. So, then it comes to CHOICE.