Students of best-sellerdom who marvel at the...

Students of best-sellerdom who marvel at the success of the Sidney Sheldons, Tom Clancys, Danielle Steels and Stephen Kings of the publishing world may wonder why none of those top-selling authors has pulled off the kind of literary pentathlon that Ann M. Martin has registered in recent weeks.

Martin, a New York book editor turned fiction writer, scored five books on a single week’s B. Dalton best-seller list. No one knows if this is an official record for a single author, but at Scholastic, Martin’s publisher, officials are reeling in the face of what they term the “incredible success” of this 30ish-year-old author.

On the other hand, Martin’s feat is probably unknown to those who confine their familiarity with best-sellers to the lists in major newspapers. And though she has more than 10 million copies of “The Baby Sitters Club” series in print just 20 months after its debut, reviews have been scarce. Martin may now be, in Scholastic’s ecstatic description, “the most popular author in America for 8-to-12-year-olds,” but most book reviews spend little time on so-called “Y.A.” or young adult, fiction titles.

“Y.A. is just not taken very seriously,” Scholastic’s Jennifer Roberts said. “In general it is viewed as not addressing the issues.”

True, the five schoolgirl baby-sitters in Martin’s monthly book series do not have lesbian mothers, drug-addicted siblings, best friends who have been abused by their stepfathers or neighbors who have their mortgages foreclosed.

But one babysitter, Stacy, does have diabetes. The baby-sitters have friends with physical handicaps. They deal with daily dilemmas of life, albeit nice, white middle-class life in a nice, white middle class town in New England, and 10-to-12-year-old girls devour the books as fast as Martin, a writer as disciplined as she is prolific, can produce them. They buy the books at such a pace that a month and a half ago, Martin’s No. 1 book was outselling the No. 1 books on adult fiction and nonfiction lists, cloth and paper.

The series evolved from an idea cooked up by Jean Feiwel, Martin’s editor at Scholastic. They caught on with a feverish ferocity, and soon engendered a loyal following among a youthful female readership. (Scholastic said there is always one boy, but just one, at Martin’s readings and signings.) A month or so ago, two 12-year-old girls interviewed Martin for their school newspaper. The first question they hurled at her was “do you write these books by yourself,” an obvious reference to the fact that Francine Pascal’s “Sweet Valley High” series is known to be written by committee. Martin insists that she sits at her word processor, alone, each morning at 7 a.m. and cranks the books out herselfm, one (ex-) editor who is anything but a failed writer.

SPOOKS IN THE STACKS. Those spooks in the stacks of some libraries, the American Library Assn. contends, are agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. No, they are not looking for out-of-print detective novels. The ALA says they are conducting a “Library Awareness Program” to look into scientific and technical data the FBI believes may have been targeted by foreign intelligence agents. At a meeting in Washington this fall with the ALA’s intellectual freedom committee, the FBI said its surveillance was limited to certain scientific and technical collections in university and public libraries in the New York City area. But the ALA replied that many of its 20 reports of FBI library visits in 1987 came from outside the New York area.

Initiated in the 1970s, the first FBI “Library Awareness Program” was dumped on grounds that it was a nonproductive use of manpower, FBI agents said at the Washington meeting with the ALA. It was reinstated recently in response to reports of a Soviet program called “Line X,” allegedly aimed directly at U.S. libraries. In September, FBI Director William Sessions wrote to Rep. Don Edwards (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights, to say that the library contacts would continue, and that the FBI would attempt to enlist the libraries’ support in its counterintelligence operations.

Thirty-eight states have laws to protect the confidentiality of library records, and professional ethics require that librarians observe a confidential relationship with library users not unlike that of doctors and patients or lawyers and clients. With access to library records permitted only under proper court order, the ALA maintains that communication between a librarian and the FBI concerning any library patron’s use of library facilities is inappropriate. The FBI, for its part, responded that some of its agents’ contacts with librarians “could have been more professional,” but insisted that in no case had FBI agents asked library employees to break state laws or violate professional ethics. It complained further that state statutes protecting library records are “not flexible enough” for national security needs.

C. James Schmidt of Mountain View, Calif., the chairman of the ALA’s Intellectual Freedom Committee, has characterized the FBI position as “not responsive to our concerns” because “the ALA position is that the FBI ought to stop doing this, and they say they’re not going to stop.” Schmidt expressed concerns in a telephone interview that “the FBI visits and the knowledge on the part of library users that they are occurring casts a chilling effect on the use of unclassified information by people in the public libraries.”

The ALA has stated it will continue to resist attempts by the FBI or others to “request, encourage or coerce” librarians to “bypass or subvert” the rights of all persons to use libraries without governmental surveillance or other invasions of privacy.

If fans of Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz, winner of the 1988 Nobel Prize for Literature, were pleased when Anchor Press won the heated bidding war for rights to publish Mahfouz’s titles in this country, the Quality Paperback Book Club thinks they will be ecstatic to hear that three of Mahfouz’s titles will be available in a special edition to be offered to members this May. “Miramar,” “The Thief and the Dogs” and “Midaq Alley” will be offered in a special, $12.95 three-in-one edition that also marks the club’s 15th anniversary, Mark Chimsky, the club’s managing editor said.