October 16, 2008

Mary Bomar

National Park Service

1849 C Street NW

Washington, DC  20240

Thank you for recognizing my passion for the WWII Memorial and my book.  I find your negative conclusions about the use of the building South of the WWII Memorial as a bookstore totally incorrect. However, I will not write you in regards to using the building south of the Memorial as a bookstore again. It’s size and capability for this task have been well-documented at http://wwiimemorial.typepad.com/my_weblog/2008/08/books-what-are-those-books-doing-there.html

I sell Jewel of the Mall at lower than distributor’™s cost to Honor Flight so they can give each veteran a copy as a memento.  I am quite proud of that and the Veterans are the best of audiences for an author.   Honor Flight has  bought up to 1150 veterans in a day and this year brought in a about 7000 veterans.  They are the fraction of the veterans who visit and the only vets who have ready access to my book. The rest have to travel hither and yon to find it.

You cite the fact that the combined bookstores of the National Park Service, Guest Services and Eastern National sold 1300 books last year. Honor Flight buys that many books in a weekend and with 15 to 20 million visitors, those low sales numbers are pathetic.

As you are a naturalized citizen and publicly quite proud of being such, you might be interested in seeing some of the faces of the young men who neither “deliberated” nor did they wait for the National Capital Planning and Fine Arts Commission to go overseas to save England, I recommend you to http://srbphoto.zenfolio.com

Regards

Stephen R. Brown

Mary Bomar, Director of NPS’s letter is reproduced below:  

****Click on it to enlarge it.