On intelligent bookselling

last night would seem to indicate that there is not much going on in Ottawa anyway. Let me join with Bill Roberts and Beth Appeldoorn - and, I believe, most booksellers in Canada - in rendering a final kick to the government by calling on the Secretary of State to do what he can to aid in committing corporate euthan·as'i'a on that illconceived venture of Canadian ego-extenOn intelligent bookselling SANDY STEWART Concerned primarily with out-of-print bookselling , I should stress these are 'fringe-area' comments. The new book market is a small portion of The Book Store's gross sales and is strictly a service item, but a first-rate area to interest the better-than-average book buyer in a more complete book service. Often we have instructions to search the out-ofprint market if the book is not in print. However, we talk to many people who are looking for new books but who do not immediately become our customers. Standing instructions to my staff are to assist the customer to other stores in town who have, or should have, the title in stock. Our referrals are based on our estimate of the new bookstores' stock, with random guesses on a "try here, or try there" basis. Our last words are "If you can't find it, come back and we'll see if it's available." If the customer finds the book in another store from our referral, we are often credited with the sale in the customer's view. Our philosophy is to GET THE CUSTOMER AND THE BOOK TOGETHER; I believe it to be the bulk of the bookseller's job. If the bookseller is good at it, he will practice bookselling for a long time. Where the customers' requirements are not specific, a reasonably well-stocked store Journal of Canadian Studies sion, namely, "Books Canada U.K." and "Books Canada New York." Both can best be described as exercises in futility that defy understanding. If even one fifth of their budget allocation was annually directed to a national book campaign, public apathy the common enemy - would be greatly reduced, maybe eventually rendered helpless. can expect to stay in business and even to prosper, if the management is competent at gauging the customers' requirements as a whole. More and more bookselling seems to depend on draping the merchandise in majestic rows like a bazaar, with the general wants of most readers considered, but at the expense of satisfying their exact requirements . Books are being shot-gunned at the buying public, and except for occasional outbursts from assorted organizations - and the odd conference here and there - nothing much is being done to inform and improve the reading public. The requirements of the 'general reader' are deteriorating into pulp levels, ably catered to by large computeroriented houses whose product has the same hack-writing year in, year out, part of a growing trend to tailor the market to the book. I sincerely doubt that there is any longterm advantage in continuing this trend. The proliferation of book clubs, the participation of non-bookstores in the 'easy' sales, the conditioning of the market by endless standard plot or series titles, the increasing hostility of publishers' discounts to single-copy orders, indeed the demands of minimum orders of 25 or 50 copies, all weigh heavily against efforts at reader education. In a "New Survey of the Book World" 91 undertaken in London in 1935, Mr. Basil Blackwell, then President of the Associated Booksellers of Great Britain and Ireland, pointed out that the "harder a book is to sell, the smaller the reward for selling it, and conversely the easier the book is to sell, the greater is the reward. The fact is that intelligent bookselling is becoming anachronistic in an age of mass production. Mass selling is not possible for the good bookseller. Each book is individual. It must be ordered by its individual title, checked individually on arrival, placed individually on the shelves, sold individually, and, not uncommonly, charged individually to a customer's account . . . However, books stocked as an accessory to some other businesses are profitable. In such cases the customer does not expect...