Oswald in the doorway: the blog of the Oswald Innocence Campaign, by Ralph Cinque

I have been focused lately on the true nature of the TSBD business and the fact that the book-distributing was largely a front for other clandestine activities. 

What I can guarantee you is that the rate at which they were shipping books, which is easy enough to surmise, could not possibly have supported that huge enterprise consisting of 75 employees. That is a lot of salaries. How many books would you have to sell? 

We have no references at all to whole boxes of books being sold and shipped, and that's strange considering that their customers were supposedly schools. If these were "readers" for classrooms, wouldn't the schools have to order enough for all the students in the class? How many students are there in a typical elementary school class? And a school could easily have more than one class using the same reader. 

If the "order-fillers" were retrieving whole boxes of books, they would have needed a cart or wagon. There is no reference or evidence of them having such things there. We are told that the "order-fillers" had clipboards. That's it.

Then, they had just one wrapper, who called himself a "mailer": Troy West. So, under normal conditions, he could handle all the outflow from all the "order-fillers"? That's the story. Think of it like a funnel. He was the neck of the funnel. And yet, he could keep up? Then, they could not have been moving too many books. And he spoke of wrapping the orders in brown paper and tying them with string using a tying machine. They are not even designed for big boxes. 

It was William Weston who first wrote about the TSBD being a CIA front company, in which school book distribution was used as the visible face for a secret, clandestine operation that involved espionage, infiltration, gun-running, and other things.

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=6017 

Think about the fact that they had all these "order-fillers" running all over the place looking for titles when there was apparently no system, no organization, no apparent way of knowing where anything was. It was just boxes plopped down, with no signs, no divisions, no categories, no nothing. 

And considering how high the stacks were, how could the order-fillers even access the books on top? Where were the ladders? 

Look how non-descript and identical the boxes look. All of the printing on the boxes, except for the word BOOKS is illegible, at least to us. 

How long would it have taken an order-filler to find a book in that mess? And how would that have affected the rate of order-processing? How could the salaries of 75 employees, plus the other expenses of the business, be supported by the orders these motley "order-fillers" could fulfill at the rate they could fulfill them? It doesn't add up.  

Why is it that in all the images we have of boxes of books, we never once see a clear label, like this?

That's a label that appears on each of the boxes of my graphic novel, Vinland which is about Leif Eriksson, the Viking who discovered America. We don't see anything comparable to that on any of the boxes at the TSBD. So, how on Earth did they locate any books? 

Then get this: they were able to divert many of the "order-fillers" into becoming "floor-builders".  But, what about all the orders they would have filled if they were doing their regular work of filling them? Did the orders just back up? Did they just keep those customers waiting? If you were running the business, wouldn't you let the order-fillers do their job and bring in a construction crew to rebuild the floors? Wouldn't it be better for the business to keep the orders going out?

Finally, I received an interesting note from OIC Chairman Larry Rivera. And it concerns the fact that Oswald kept working at CIA-connected companies: Jaggars/Chiles/Stovall in Dallas, the Reily Coffee Company in New Orleans, and then the TSBD in Dallas. Perhaps Oswald had a sense that there was more going on at this company than distributing Dick and Jane readers. They had a conference room on the 2nd floor. A conference room. What would you need a conference room for if you were distributing Dick and Jane readers? Could they have been conferring about other things in that conference room? Look at all the secretaries and white collar staff they had. How could they need all those white collar people to keep track of the relatively few books that the "order-fillers" were moving? Larry wonders whether Oswald had the sense that this business wasn't what it appeared to be, and that he was trying to find out. That is an interesting proposition. After all, he did have intelligence connections.