WHEN RANDALL BEEK joined a handful of the nation's elite small publishers in a National Endowment for the Arts conference room in Washington, D.C., he had no idea that a crisis was brewing elsewhere in the organization's labyrinthine bureaucracy. As Beek, CEO of St. Paul's Consortium Book Sales and Distribution, would soon learn, NEA officials were anxiously debating the political ramifications of a book published by the tiny, family-owned Cinco Puntos Press in El Paso, Texas. The officials had discovered that the book, an illustrated... More >>>