The phrase “cheese eating surrender monkeys” first entered the main lexicon of American English just before the beginning of the second Iraq war courtesy of the ever-running The Simpsons cartoon series.  France’s reputation for toughness has never recovered from that whole WWII-breakout-in-the-Ardennes-Forest thing and when the country declined to join the forces preparing to invade Iraq post 9/11, “surrender monkey” became a popular meme which makes the teeth of every Frenchmen grind. Thus, it was with some surprise that I found myself writing admiringly of the courage of the French as Jeff Bezos and his merry band of monopolists/monopolists attempted to take control of the last independent bastion of book publishing, the trades. More formally known as trade book publishers, the companies who belong to what was once a very exclusive club include Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, Hachette Liver, HarperCollins, Macmillan Publishers, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, collectively known as “The Big Five, (soon to be the Big Four as Penguin is scheduled to take over Simon & Schuster). The mid-rank companies include Scholastic, Wiley, Oxford University Kensington and a bevy of others. The object of my French crush was Hachette, a division of Hachette Livre, an international publishing...