The Quality Paperback Club feels *exactly* the same way about trees. What a coincidence! Image via Shutterstock.

Quality Paperback Book Club loves its members. It wants to share great books with them for low prices every month, to give them their next great read, to fulfill all its members’ dreams and desires of what a relationship between a human being and a corporate entity that thinks you look like you need a little Anna Quindlen today, girl, could be.

And if the two of you start going through some tough times, and it’s not like it was at the start, when it was all promise and excitement and passion and four novels for four dollars, the QPB doesn’t want to see you throw a good thing away, just ‘cause nobody’s perfect and it keeps showing up at your door, bringing you horrible presents and asking for money.

No games: the QPB really, really doesn’t want to break up with you. As Marla Knutsen of Altadena discovered when she tried to cancel her subscription last winter, kicking off months of fruitless wrangling and mounting bills for unwanted books, all of which business and consumer columnist David Lazarus describes in an article for the Los Angeles Times’ business section last week.

As Lazarus writes, it isn’t surprising that a mail order book club turns out to selectively mishear a consumer when they try to cancel the service. But it is surprising how shady the corporate structure of the QPB appears to be and how impossible it proves to be to get information from anyone, as Lazarus learns after he offers to help Knutsen with the cancellation.

First, he tracks his way through a series of parent companies and ex-parent companies with increasingly bland names: QPB turns out to be part of the Bookspan, which operates nineteen similar book clubs and was founded in the early 2000s by Bertelsmann and Time Warner. Bookspan, in turn, is the corporate successor to the original and mighty Book of the Month Club Inc. In 2008, after Bertelsmann took over sole control of the company, Bookspan was sold to an investment firm, Najafi Cos. But then:

In early 2013, Najafi issued a press release saying it had sold its majority stake in Bookspan and Columbia House to something called Pride Tree Holdings. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.

And that’s where the trail suddenly grows cold.

If you do a Web search for Pride Tree Holdings, you’ll find virtually nothing except a handful of references to it being the buyer of Bookspan and Columbia House. No other business activities come up. No address or phone number is given. No corporate officers are named.

You’ll find info for Pride Tree Holdings’ subsidiaries, such as Bookspan and Direct Brands, which operates Columbia House. But Pride Tree Holdings itself is, in Internet terms, an almost blank page.

Lazarus also tries to make contact through emails and phone calls to Customer Service, but the result isn’t much better. When he at last reaches a real person, he’s stymied once again:

A senior executive at Bookspan eventually responded to an email I sent and offered to look into Knutsen’s problem. But he declined to speak on the record about his own company, Quality Paperback Book Club or Pride Tree Holdings.

He said there was no one else I could speak with.

As a last resort, Lazarus suggests sending a certified letter to Bookspan’s New York offices— more or less the equivalent of getting your loudmouthed friend to go to QPC’s apartment and tell them: it’s over.