Writers' block: what will Bush-bashing book authors do if Kerry wins?

• Author: Quirk, Matthew
• Position: 10 Miles Square

Jack Huberman doesn't seem particularly mad as he reads The New York Times oil his laptop. He doesn't grumble or cringe, or ball his fists. As his tongue snatches a small crumb of toasted English muffin from his top lip, he looks the way any other trim, middle-aged man of average height with retreating gray hair would look while catching up on the news and checking his email on a Sunday afternoon. But Jack is full of hate. It's his job.

"Surge in Iraqi violence results in overflowing morgues,'" he says, checking the headlines. "That's a good one." When Huberman finds something in the paper that makes him hate George W. Bush, which is often, he copies it into a Microsoft Word document, organized by alphabetical headings (Campaign Finance Reform; Cheney and Halliburton; Chicken hawks), and formats it according to an elaborate system. For every tidbit excerpted, the chief reason to hate Bush is put in bold type, while secondary reasons are underlined. Copied text goes in 11-point font; editorial comments from Huberman in 12-point. Everything else is cut, with deletions indicated by ellipses. Occasionally, Bush elicits so much hate on a given subject that Huberman is forced to make adjustments. At one point this summer, for instance, he noticed the file was getting very front-heavy, owing to a strong performance by the president in the "Iraq" category. "The mid-point was about F," notes Huberman. "So I had to break War Profiteering out from Iraq as a separate section."

So goes work on the potential second volume of The Bush-Haters Handbook: A Guide to the Most Appalling President of the Past 100 Years. (The first volume, which came out last December, is currently in its fifth printing.) So far, volume two is 432-pages long. Every entry still needs to be trimmed and condensed into what will become short essays detailing different aspects of the 43rd president's loathesomeness. But before any of that can happen, an event must occur which Huberman's many readers almost certainly dread: George W. Bush must win reelection. "It is a conflict," admits Huberman, whose months of research would go to waste should John Kerry win. "But I would gladly sacrifice volume two," Huberman adds hurriedly, "if it meant living through another four years with this crew, it wouldn't be worth it. But if they're back, God forbid, I'm ready."

Huberman isn't the only one. By a conservative count, there are over 150 books on the market dedicated exclusively to the...