We seem to be witnessing a renaissance in protests — if that’s the word for it — against political books. When Sarah Palin went on a bus tour last fall to promote “Going Rogue,” a man at the Mall of America threw tomatoes at her. When Tony Blair appeared in Dublin to promote his memoir, “A Journey,” people threw eggs and shoes. During Karl Rove’s recent tour in support of “Courage and Consequence,” a handcuff-carrying activist tried to arrest him for war crimes — twice. Thank goodness George W. Bush, whose “Decision Points” hits stores on Nov. 9, already comes with a Secret Service detail.

But none of today’s protesters have anything on the Committee to Boycott Nixon’s Memoirs, a group that was every bit as real as the notorious Committee for the Re-election of the President, though much less remembered.

To understand the Committee to Boycott Nixon’s Memoirs, it’s necessary to understand how much anger and nervous energy swirled around the 1978 release of “RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon.” The book’s story actually began on Aug. 9, 1974 — the same day Gerald Ford was sworn in as president — when The New York Times reported that Nixon was looking for a book deal. After the hardcover publishers all passed, it fell to Warner Paperback Library, a corporate sibling of Warner Bros. best known for publishing DC Comics and Mad Magazine, to give Nixon his $2.5 million advance. Over the next four years, every detail of the project was breathlessly reported. Would Warner publish a hardcover? (In 1977, it sold the hardcover rights, and turned over editorial control, to Grosset & Dunlap.) When would the book come out? What about the title? And wasn’t Nixon playing an awful lot of golf?

The absurdity peaked in early 1978, when a short-lived New York newspaper called The Trib broke the news that Grosset & Dunlap was enlisting David Frost, the British journalist whose interviews with Nixon had riveted audiences, to help with some last-minute revisions. As it turned out, the company’s chief copy editor, a 41-year-old Brooklynite, was also named David Frost. Still, the scoops kept coming. “RN” would run to nearly 1,200 pages. “RN” would sell for $19.95, twice the price of a normal hardcover. “RN” would be titled “RN.” After the book’s first sentence leaked in New York magazine, The Village Voice started a contest to come up with the best final sentence. Example: “Volume II of my memoirs will deal with the period in my life from age 9 to age 18.”