The people who run Edwin Mellen Press are pretty clearly nuts.  (Calling these folks "nuts" isn't actionable in the United States, but, for the record, my lawyer is based in the same jurisdiction as Mellen Press, New York, though maybe my wife's law firm here in Chicago would enjoy assigning the case to a junior associate for practice.)  This time they're pursuing the "Scholarly Kitchen" blog, for a blog post that is clearly not actionable, and for a comment on that post that is also probably not actionable.  Here's the "offending" post by Mr. Anderson of the blog:  nothing in it is libelous, even if Mellen Press and Mr. Richardson were private citizens, rather then public figures.  The letter from the Press's lawyer says, obviously falsely, that the blog has a "legal obligation" to deal with possibly defamatory comments; the comment in question is probably not defamatory, but even if it were, the Scholarly Kitchen blog has no obligation to remove it.  The law in the United States is as clear as can be on this point.  As best I can tell, Ms. Amendola, the Press's lawyer, is a 2010 graduate of the law school at the State University of New York at Buffalo, who worked briefly for a Buffalo law firm, and is now a solo practitioner.   If state bar associations were more aggressive, she should be disbarred for sending nonsense threats like the one she sent to the "Scholarly Kitchen" blog.

I predict that the Edwin Mellen Press will be out of business within the next few years.  Good riddance, given this disgraceful pattern of harassment.  May I suggest that any authors of serious monographs with the Mellen Press contact them now and urge them to reform their "public relations" practices?

UPDATE:  More from IHE.