Good Eats: The Early Years (Early edition)

A very special apology to one Alton Brown and his fans. I don't know if any of you have noticed it, but Mr.Brown has a new book slated for release on October 6th. If you've been through our stores at just the right moments, you may have seen that book on our sales floor. I myself even placed it out there at first, lacking any information telling us not to display it, but then later returned it to the back out of a gut feeling that something seemed a little off.
The next day I worked I found it back out on the sales floor. This is AFTER I left the stack of them in the back with a post-it note saying "OCTOBER ???", having found the singularly vaguest reference to it's release in our stores computer catalog system.

As a book store, we have certain books which we cannot sell before certain dates, and those dates are made known to us in a listing of strict on-sale dates. Yet when all of this was going on, just a few days ago, by the way, our latest current listings only show what is coming out through the rest of September. This month. Anything October 1st or later is (or at least at that point was) completely unknown to us by the resources made available by our company.
The book itsself wouldn't even ring up in our system to display a handy "do not sell" notification. The only thing which made any note of the books release was our catalog system, which only states the month of a books release, not the specific date, and certainly not whether it was a strict on-sale.
Lacking access to the outside internet, we once more had to rely on the limited information contained within our gigantic store full of books and publications, which of course came up short in this particular instance.

So, to Alton Brown, and Food Network, yes we have the books, and I am trying to keep them safe. (You could have sent them in a fancy box with a date printed on them, though!) To the fans, no we do not have the book, it will be available on the 6th.