CPSIA from a Bookseller’s Perspective

Posted by Valerie on February 28, 2009

Last summer, a teacher in Tehran contacted our small used bookstore requesting a set of children’s books for his school’s summer reading program. We were happy to supply that box of literature for Iranian children, along with 4500 other books that we mailed to nearly 50 countries last year.

Many of the books that we sell are out-of-print children’s books requested by teachers, parents and grandparents. Sadly, this year Jacobsen Books can no longer legally market many of these older children’s books as appropriate for children, nor can we legally export them as children’s products due to new restrictions on products intended for or commonly perceived as appropriate for children.

The Child Product Safety Improvement Act, or CPSIA, was passed on August 14, 2008, and many of its most burdensome provisions came into effect on February 10, 2009. CPSIA has created a new system where no product for children up to the age of twelve can be legally marketed or sold unless a seller knows (and ultimately, could prove) that the product is lead-free and phthalate-free. This includes all pre-existing children’s items in America.

If a product includes either lead or phthalates in more than the tiniest trace amounts in any component, no matter how small, that product cannot be sold as a children’s product. Why is this a problem? It is a problem because in some cases traces of lead are known to be harmless (as in, for example, the inks used to print old children’s books), in some cases beneficial (as in ball point pens) and in some cases necessary for safety (as in bicycle tires).

This legislation is expected to damage 60-80% of American businesses, but more importantly, CPSIA itself is known to be harmful to children. CPSIA is harmful to children, first, because American businesses supply the wealth that provides for the daily needs of American children. Our businesses are owned by parents and grandparents, and they employ more parents and grandparents. Our businesses are the direct source of income that provides children with food, clothing, housing, educational equipment, hobby supplies, and toys, including birthday and Christmas gifts.

Congress has acted contrary to the interests of American children and has, with CPSIA, initiated an assault against them. As CPSIA damages and decimates American businesses, as CPSIA shrinks the parental purse, American children feel the effects.

CPSIA is also a problem because it has essentially put a barrier between our children and some of the best children’s products ever manufactured. In the case of used products or specialty products, the effect is devastation, but all areas of children’s products are severely affected, including the following

• children’s books, with conditional illegality for every children’s book printed before 1985
• pens, pencils and art supplies, with absolute illegality for every Snoopy and Mickey Mouse pen made for children
• dance, ice-skating and dressage costumes of all kinds, with absolute illegality for using crystal beads or rhinestones
• children’s clothing from socks to winter coats, with conditional illegality for all used and hand-me-down clothing
• toys and games, with especially heavy regulatory burdens for homemade toymakers and thrift stores
• educational supplies and equipment, with conditional illegality for most science supplies
• adaptive and special needs devices for disabled children
• bicycles and minibikes, with absolute illegality for many parts, most repair, for necessary features like tire valves–and for necessary safety equipment for children’s welfare

In the case of our family, CPSIA affects our ability to find affordable, used clothing for our children. We have eleven children ages 2 to 19, and we have found thrift stores and garage sales to be the very gifts of God to our children over the years. Now, every thrift store and every yard sale operates under the heavy regulatory hand of CPSIA, which includes the explicit mention of “yard sales” in its text.

CPSIA is extreme oppression of our family business. Our small bookstore sells books both locally and world-wide and provides the sole source of income for our eleven children. With all the hype about lead coming from China in 2007, not everyone is aware that our government does not have a single record of a  child poisoned by a book, an article of clothing, an educational product, or a regular children’s toy. The only recorded harm, in terms of lead poisoning, came from children’s metal jewelry. (Even with the jewelry, the risk is extremely small, perhaps properly left to parental supervision and guidance.  Within our nation of 80 million children, there have been only two instances of lead poisoning from swallowed children’s jewelry.)

Here at JacobsenBooks.com and ValeriesLivingBooks.com, we’re just trying to make a living offering  good books to families who love them; the thought of trying to comply with CPSIA by not selling children’s books is almost unbearable, and the word that we get from Congress is, “Oh, well.”

Many days it feels like no one really cares about the destruction and loss that we and many others are facing.

The majority of twentieth century children’s books are long out-of-print, but our copies still find their most natural homes in a children’s hands. In the wake of CPSIA and due to the fact that tiny amounts of lead were once used in printing inks, the CPSC has issued a guideline stating that we may only sell most older children’s books if we are selling them as collectors’ items for adults. While this exception may seem like the perfect loophole to keep our store in business serving children and their families, we know that most of our children’s books are not desired by adult collectors. We can’t successfully market our product by advertising it only to people who don’t want it!

In order to sell children’s literature effectively, we must be permitted to address families, our true market, freely and honestly. We must be free to describe appropriate reading levels and relate our inventory to childish interests.

On February 3rd, 2009, CPSC Commissioner Thomas Hill Moore contacted CPSIA’s original sponsor, Senator Bobby Rush of Illinois, revealing the new requirement that pre-1985 children’s books must be sequestered from distribution to children until enormously expensive lead testing is completed. Just as the CPSIA’s new restrictions were becoming effective on February 10th, the CPSC gave us booksellers less than four hours’ notice that our pre-1985 children’s books, already in inventory, are now suspect, meaning that many cannot be legally sold.

An audit of our current inventory shows that 65% of our books for children ages 8-12 and 35% of our books for cihldren ages 2-8 were printed before 1985. To bring our 7000 volume inventory into compliance, we must rearrange our store layout, our signage, our children’s activities, our web sites, and our book listings so that we are marketing these beautiful old children’s books only to adult collectors who don’t want most of them, rather than to the parents and teachers of children who would love them.

Our only option for marketing most pre-1985 books for children is now expensive testing. A $40,000 XRF screening gun would readily identify the good pieces of children’s literature that must now be recycled, never again to be read by children. Not only can we not afford to do this, but we also cannot bear the thought. We are booksellers; our mission is to preserve, protect, and disseminate good literature.

Under CPSIA, the CPSC is not free to make the mercy exception that booksellers and librarians and children need. The CPSC cannot legally exempt any children’s product that could possibly result in “absorption of any lead into the human body, taking into account normal and reasonably foreseeable use and abuse of such product by a child, including swallowing….” The “any lead” standard permits no exceptions. This restriction, applied to children’s books, will save no lives, prevent no disabilities and have no positive impact on children’s health.

A child who swallows a page from a book might possibly absorb an insignificant amount of lead, but no child has ever been poisoned by a book, and lead is not always dangerous. Even the data on phthalates is very weak, with no identifiable instances of poisoning whatsoever.

Lead is inappropriate in excessive amounts in children’s metal jewelry, and perhaps on painted children’s toys (although we have no evidence of harm), but lead can be beneficial in other children’s products. Lead permits children’s microscopes to work, forms the connections that let educational games operate, and keeps children’s bicycle tires durable and safe. CPSIA is unworkable as written. The assault of CPSIA is unwarranted and must be repealed immediately.

There may be no end to the painful unintended consequences if we allow this blanket application of strict, arbitrary lead levels to be applied to every conceivable children’s product without regard to measurable risk.

Before CPSIA, we already had laws forbidding the use of dangerous or inappropriate amounts of lead in children’s products. CPSIA unnecessarily erects a new barrier between our children and their safe educational products. In America, we do want to keep our children safe, so it might possibly have been time to do some pruning of legislation affecting interstate commerce of children’s products, but it certainly was not time to clear-cut the world of wonderful children’s products.

When it comes to books, CPSIA is also a free speech issue. Before our government can restrict the freedom of speech and its corollary, the freedom to obtain information, it must prove that it is legislating a compelling government interest in the least restrictive way. Nothing about CPSIA meets this test.

In my experience as a homeschooling parent and a bookseller, children as young as eight or ten will sometimes develop admiration for particular authors or series. Some children, even at surprisingly early ages, will create reading lists, seeking every title, often using inter-library loan programs for this purpose. I hope that it doesn’t happen, but if the day comes when a student walks into a library and fills out an inter-library loan request and is told that his request cannot possibly be filled because 1) he is only ten years old and 2) that children’s book was last printed in 1975, I would say that the State has clearly infringed his First Amendment right.

We cannot let our government harm our children in this way. No one was ever in favor of putting dangerous products in the hands of small children, but CPSIA brings a powerful, dangerous weapon of destruction into the communities and even the homes of our kids. CPSIA is already in force; it is far too late to prevent the economic devastation that has already occured, but it is not too late to rescue what’s left.

The hands of the Consumer Product Safety Commission are tied; there is no way out of this horror except by repealing or aggressively amending CPSIA. I want you to call your senators and call your congressman this next week. If your senators and your congressman are not willing to go on the record as sponsors of legislation to repeal or amend CPSIA, I really hope that you will think about replacing them in 2010.

We need action before more families and more children are hurt. “I’ll write a letter for you” is not enough. “I feel your pain” is not enough. What does it take to become a sponsor? No more than a willingness to go on the record and the ability to use a pen. Any of your representatives can do it, if they will, and so can mine. One option is S.374, Senator Jim DeMint’s Bill to Amend the Consumer Product Safety Act to provide regulatory relief to small and family-owned businesses.