Bookend
B ookbuyer
Booksellers' Conferences — those annual seaside attempts to sort out the trade's problems — have always carried an air of cloud-cuckooland. Publishers are censured, resolutions passed, action promised, and details arranged for the next .year's gettogether when delegates can discover why more progress has not been made. Last week's gathering at Scarborough was, on the surface, more or less true form.
There were the usual legitimate laments over publishers' poor delivery service; over publishers' discounts — booksellers, broadly speaking, want a standard of between 35 and 40 per cent, instead of the 20 to 35 per cent they now get; and, for the second year running, over publishers' price stickers (those on the jacket that cover up other stickers that cover up prices which have long since doubled.) There was the annual comic spectacle of the admirable Book Tokens organisation explaining patiently, as they have these seven conferences past, that since their financial year ends on April 30, figures were not yet available. And there was a soupcon of farce as the Booksellers Association treasurer in-, formed members that his bookkeeper had lost 400 invoice forms and that the auditors felt unable to give their unqualified approval to the accounts — which in fact appeared to show a loss of some E600.
Bookbuyer's prize for the most depressing talk in an otherwise stoically good-natured session goes to the chairman of the Charter Group, that band of 450 true booksellers with their own high standards of professional conduct. From his report it transpired that his liaison sub-committee had suspended discussions with publishers over discounts; that his publicity sub-committee had bolshily declined to support his efforts to turn the Group into more of an elite; that the Publishers Association had apparently sabotaged an exchange training scheme, and that a presidential inquiry was about to examine the whole concept of the Group anyway.
On the other side of the fence, there were ominous warnings over the future of the Book Development Council, whose overseas exhibi tion scheme was reported in danger of collapse through lack of support from publishers. And there was the National Book League's director Martyn Goff showing an unusually low profile in declining, perhaps diplomatically, to 'mention the £250,000 public appeal he will shortly be launching to keep the NBL afloat As usual at such conferences, the
boring talks were also the best. High-poweri,i papers on stock control, earnings ratio..,
readership surveys and other commercial nitty-gritty provided easily the most heartening feature of the week and confirmed once and for all that booksellers are not always
retired colonels or well provided-for ladies iit .a certain age: This may inevitably lead to higliei book prices which still, however, compare favourably with bar prices — though in Scarborough it wa, drinks, rather than books. . which seemed miiiA in demand.
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