What do Minnesota bookstores do when authors break bad?

If you’re looking for a copy of a Neil Gaiman novel, don’t bother checking at Avant Garden Books & Coffee in Anoka. The store has removed Gaiman from its shelves.

Gaiman is one of several authors who have been in the news recently for reasons other than their writing. Last month, lawsuits were filed against Gaiman in three jurisdictions, including Wisconsin (where he once lived), accusing the horror/fantasy writer of human trafficking, which he denies. When seven more women accused him of sexual misconduct in a story in New York magazine, he denied those allegations, too.

Last year, Nobel Prize-winning author Alice Munro’s daughter Andrea Skinner wrote a newspaper story that said she had been sexually assaulted by Munro’s second husband and that her late mother did nothing to stop it. And J.K. Rowling, whose “Harry Potter” novels remain wildly popular, has made anti-trans statements that cost her some of her audience.

These and other cases can create a dilemma for readers and booksellers: What to do about art we admire that is created by people we don’t?

Most bookstores leave it in the hands of patrons.

“The bottom line is we just trust customers. They know what they want,” said Gretchen West, manager of Stillwater’s Valley Bookseller, which doesn’t remove titles by problematic authors. “We always say we try to stock everything and customers decide what we re-stock.”

That decision may depend on the size of what Claire Dederer calls the “stain” on an artist whose work is marred by their behavior. In her “Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma,” Dederer writes about enjoying Roman Polanski’s “Chinatown” but also finding herself “awed by his monstrousness. It was monumental, like the Grand Canyon, huge and void-like and slightly incomprehensible.” The “stain,” she argued, was too large to overlook the behavior of Polanski (who fled the U.S. after pleading guilty to unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor), Woody Allen (accused of abuse by daughter Dylan, which he denies) and others.

Many years ago, DreamHaven Books owner Greg Ketter was disturbed by misogynistic statements from John Norman, who wrote a book series about a different kind of monster, the “Gor” fantasy books. Ketter took them off the Minneapolis store’s shelves for a time but ended up restocking them when customers requested them.

About a dozen Gaiman titles remain at DreamHaven, although his presence isn’t as big as it once was. That’s largely because Gaiman has been more involved in filmmaking than novel writing in recent years (after the allegations became public, a planned Disney movie of “The Graveyard Book” was put on hold, although several completed film and TV shows are expected to be released eventually. He’s also been dropped by a U.K. publisher and a “Coraline” musical has been scrapped).

“We had a huge section for Neil Gaiman for years but it had been slowing down, so we were just moving things around when everything came out in the news,” said Ketter, who published some of Gaiman’s early work. “We are still selling some of his books and things. We just leave it up to people. If they keep buying books, we keep them on the shelves.”

The attitude is different at Avant Garden, “an unapologetically feminist and LGBTQIA-inclusive” business, according to owner Jenni Hill. Because it was created as a welcoming space for all kinds of people, Hill said, “We strive to carry books in-store that reflect our values.”

That means Avant Garden, which opened about four years ago, has never stocked Rowling titles, which Hill worries might trigger trans customers and their allies: “I don’t want anyone to feel I would advocate for a writer who has been hurtful to our community.”

That’s also why Avant Garden stopped carrying Gaiman titles as soon as the allegations came out.

“I texted Emily, our employee, ‘Let’s remove his books.' That was literally the whole discussion,” said Hill. “It just doesn’t feel right to profit from those books. And I’d already bought the books, so I will lose money on those. But I won’t restock them for sure.”

Beyond stocking titles, there’s also the question of how much to promote books that already are in-store.

“We have the books in sections and we have easels where we ‘face-out’ books, we call it. It’s amazing how if you put a book on an easel, it sells faster than when it’s lined up on a shelf. We wouldn’t necessarily put a Neil Gaiman out on an easel or build any kind of display,” said West. She added that Valley Bookseller clerks have obviously heard the news about Gaiman, Munro and others and it’s up to them to choose whether to recommend those titles.

At Subtext Books in St. Paul, store manager Patrick Nathan echoes Dederer’s argument that sometimes a reader’s appreciation for an author can overcome bad behavior; sometimes it can’t.

“I may not hand sell these authors, nor put them in a newsletter roundup, but I’m not going to pretend their books don’t exist. We have a lot of people who come in and have no idea what these authors have been accused of — it’s just not part of certain readers’ media diets to know these things,” said Nathan, a novelist whose “The Future Was Color” was published last year. “It’s not my place, I don’t think, to deflate their love for these works by sharing unwanted information about the author.”

All the booksellers say their decisions are made by listening to customers. Maybe those customers are already speaking. At Valley Bookseller, for instance, West said they have one Gaiman book, a copy of his popular “American Gods.” It’s been on the shelf since December. So far, no takers.