Booksellers' blight
Sir: Surprising as it may seem, Benny Green's criticism of booksho -s (Juno 12) is shared by at least one bookseller who is attempting to do something about it. Even in these days of so-called ' full line trading,' it cannot be sensible to stock a bookshop with the paraphernalia Mr Green lists, such as napkin rings and lavatory rolls. If a bookseller -cannot make a living selling books (and most can't), he might try supermarket operations.
However, it is important to ask why a bookseller cannot make a living selling books. Perhaps it is because he does not so much sell them as make them available. The conceptual distinction between these two approaches is vast and, from my experience and at least as far as the small bookseller is concerned, is the difference between making a profit in book retailing and not making a profit. I would go further. Books not only need to be actively sold, they need to be marketed: and that implies the use of techniques which are sheer heresy in so traditional a business as bookselling; for example, merchandising.
If by the year 2000 the bookshop is a quaint, anachronistic left-over from earlier centuries, the major cause will be as much the apathy and lack of modern management skills and techniques of booksellers as the action of publishers which at times seem to be directed by the "half-witted market researchers" Benny Green refers to.
Let there be no mistake, marketing research and the many other techniques which have brought some branches of retailing to such a pitch of efficiency are needed, If these techniques are misused because they are not understood or more likely because they are in fact nothing more than an expensive ritual to lure the customer to the product of point of sale and not a means of adjustment to the customer's needs, then bookseller and publisher will sing together, which will be sad for them but disastrous for the book-buyer and book-lover.
Penelope A. Vousden Volume One Limited, 37 Connaught Street, London W2
Sir: I was very amused to read that "Rhodes University must qualify for the title of the worst in the English-speaking world" according to old John Vaizey. Has he visited the one in Lusaka?
M. A. Parsons
Pembroke College, Oxford.
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