WWW- Nine nudes are a no-go at Wal-Mart.
The giant store chain won’t stock Jon Stewart’s big best-seller, “America (The Book),” because one page shows nine naked bodies – with the heads of the Supreme Court justices pasted on them.
In the pseudo civics textbook, readers are asked to restore the judges’ dignity by matching the nine with their black robes on the opposite page.
“America,” written by Stewart and his “Daily Show” colleagues, will mark its third week Sunday at No.1 on The New York Times best-seller list.
Though not on Wal-Mart’s store shelves, “America” was still being offered yesterday on Walmart.com – at 45% off the $24.95 list price.
“We felt a majority of our customers may not be comfortable with the image in our stores,” Wal-Mart spokeswoman Karen Burk said yesterday.
“But we still wanted to give them the option of buying it from Walmart.com,” she added.
The book was yanked by Wal-Mart after a distributor alerted the chain to the extreme Supremes, Burk explained.
At Warner Books, which produced “America,” publisher Jamie Raab was “disappointed” by Wal-Mart’s decision, but added, “On the other hand, they have the right to decide what’s appropriate for their stores.”
Co-author Ben Karlin, executive producer of “The Daily Show,” said he was also disappointed, adding, “We even have an American flag on the cover.”
In recent years Wal-Mart has refused to sell magazines with racy covers and CDs with sexually explicit lyrics. Some CDs have been available at Wal-Mart in edited editions – with the hot lyrics removed.
Wal-Mart’s book bounce was reported Monday night by PW NewsLine, an E-mail from Publishers Weekly.
Warner started with 550,000 copies of “America” last month. Raab said the number in print has since soared above 1.4 million.