BY MICHAEL BAUMANN

Distributors of the Militant and Pathfinder books have set June 1-9 as a target week of sales. The aim is to get ahead that week with extra sales of Pathfinder books on the job, in working- class communities, and on campuses and use the momentum generated to meet all the book campaign goals in June. The extra push is also necessary to meet the goals of the Militant subscription drive.

Sales of Pathfinder books go hand in hand with efforts to win new subscribers to the Militant and its Spanish-language sister publication Perspectiva Mundial.

Socialist workers from Seattle demonstrated this in practice last week, as they put the book and subscription campaigns at the center of ongoing work in defense of the Cuban revolution. "Sign Up and Go to Cuba!" read the banner over their table at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. Several students signed up for more information on the July 24-August 6 Youth Exchange trip to Cuba, Robbie Scherr reports.

Sales for two days totaled $100 in Pathfinder titles, 2 copies of the Marxist magazine New International, and 8 introductory subscriptions to the Militant. In addition, they signed up a new member for the Pathfinder Reader Club. (Scherr's report came by E- mail; the subscriptions themselves, coming via a slower route, didn't arrive on time to be added to the chart.)

Socialist auto workers found a similar response on the job at the General Motors assembly plant in Tarrytown, New York, last week. They sold ten subscriptions to the Militant to coworkers. Two of the new subscribers bought copies of the books How Far We Slaves Have Come and Malcolm X: The Evolution of a Revolutionary. Since the beginning of May, socialists at the GM plant have sold 34 Pathfinder titles to co-workers.

With similar efforts, Militant readers around the world can help boost sales of socialist literature that lag behind so far this month, as the charts show.

Book sales at street tables are picking up in Christchurch, New Zealand, Mike Peters notes, citing as an example a conversation at a regular site near a shopping mall. "I've seen you here heaps of times before," the young person said. "But with what's happening in the world, I wanted to find out more." He ended up buying a copy of the Communist Manifesto and Socialism: Utopian and Scientific.

Supporters in Christchurch, are also off to a good start in the subscription drive. Three subscriptions were sold in the first week, two to students and one to a worker at a local meatpacking plant who, after reading a copy, said he wanted to visit Cuba.

Pathfinder supporters in Massachusetts drew a steady stream of browsers and buyers to a socialist literature table at the Harvard Square Book Festival May 19. Mary Nell Bockmann reports, "We sold 17 books and pamphlets, including two copies of Episodes of the Cuban Revolutionary War, and a range of other titles from the Communist Manifesto to Leon Trotsky's My Life and On the Jewish Question." Total sales hit nearly $200 for the day.

At a table in South Boston the day before an Irish rights fighter, pointing to signs demanding "Britain out of Ireland," said he had come over because he had "heard you were having a bit of a picket." He asked about books by Che Guevara, bought a copy of Episodes, and donated some posters on the Irish struggle for display at the local Pathfinder Bookstore.

Pathfinder editor Sara Lobman, currently on a sales visit in Pennsylvania, followed up on a tip from a college bookstore and met with a political science professor. The teacher was particularly interested in the Communist Manifesto, Pathfinder's top-selling class-adoption title, because of its combination of annotation and good price.

Lobman and local supporters are also visiting libraries in the state, making sure to check the computerized catalogs first to spot the gaps in the institutions' collections.

A panel of activists and fighters participated along with two dozen others in the grand opening of the new Pathfinder bookstore in Peoria May 11, Angel Lariscy reports. A highlight was the remarks by Dan Lane, a former member of the United Paperworkers union who was locked out by A.E. Staley in Decatur, Illinois.

Lane, who had just returned from an action in solidarity with bus drivers who had been locked out in Mexico, noted that Pathfinder books like Teamster Rebellion explain where workers' roots are. "They're about our struggles and the fight against the bosses," Lane said.  
 
 
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