Bookbuyer's
Bookend
Bookbuyer hesitates to say that these are worrying times for booksellers, as there has never been a time when times were not worrying them. But the arrival of the so-called mega-authorities in local government seems likely to cause them even more worries than usual.
Just as several general publishers are cushioned by the profits of their educational and technical divisions, so many booksellers
rely heavily on their school, and to a lesser extent, library supply business. During the past few years there has been a small but growing tendency for local authorities to buy their books direct from publishers — a practice which, it should be said, has not been too
rigorously resisted by the publishers themselves. Booksellers were afraid that as these
authorities increased in size — which they have indeed done since local government reorganisation — the incidence of direct buying would increase too.
Those who believed that such fears were unfounded were abruptly disabused by the Kent County Supplies Officer last week. In a deceptively genial address to some seventy booksellers, he made it quite clear that any local authority dissatisfied with the service it got from a local bookseller or wholesaler would consider itself under an obligation to buy direct. On the 'surface, reasonable words from a reasonable man who, as he pointed out, was responsible for spending £16 million worth of public money, of which El million on books. At the same time Bookbuyer's fleeting experience of local authority chiefs suggests that not all of them are totally reasonable, and that some of them, keen to make their em pire-builder's mark, might prefer to do their own thing whatever the standard of their bookshop service. It seems too much to hope that such gentlemen would give a fig for the health and survival of a quality bookshop.
A simple man might say that there is a simple answer to all this. If, as most publishers purport to believe, it is important that good bookshops survive and multiply, and if the removal of their educational business is likely to prevent this, then publishers might help to improve the standard of local bookshops who are not up to the job and thus deprive any local authority of the excuse to buy direct. The onus would then be on the authorities to prove that they could do a better job themselves. Not only would they find it a very difficult thing to prove anyway, but publishers, being animals of high ingenuity and low cunning, hardly need Bookbuyer to tell them how they could make it an impossible thing to prove.
Until recently, Frieda Lockhart was an assistant editor at New English Library. She was also the company's only NUJ book branch member. Last month she began to talk to other members of the firm to see whether they were also interested in joining the union. The following day she was taken on one side by NEL's able and genial managing director, Bob Tanner, and sacked. She had not, he suggested, lived up to his hopes as an editorial assistant and would have to leave the premises that day, in return for which she would be paid a generous sum of money amounting to over E400. Bookbuyer has never worked with Miss Lockhart, so cannot say whether she is an incompetent rabble-rouser or not.
Previous page
