BY KATY LEROUGETEL
TORONTO - The Pathfinder Press Distribution center set up in
Toronto this past August is looking forward to increasing sales
in the coming year. Housed in the same building as the
Pathfinder Bookstore, it is run by volunteers who pick, pack
and invoice orders for Pathfinder titles from bookstores and
schools across Canada.
"Students at a university in British Columbia have been reading Pathfinder's An Introduction to Marxist Economic Theory by Ernest Mandel, which was ordered as a course adoption title in the fall," said John Steele, business manager. "And the Marxist classic Socialism: Utopian and Scientific by Frederick Engels, published by Pathfinder as an inexpensive pamphlet, is being used in a course at another campus."
Top sellers since the opening of the center have been Pathfinder's recent titles Pombo: A Man of Che's `guerrilla' and At the Side of Che Guevara: Interviews with Harry Villegas (Pombo). Cuban Brig. Gen. Harry Villegas fought with Ernesto Che Guevara in the Cuban revolutionary war and later, under the nom de guerre Pombo, joined Guevara in internationalist missions in the Congo and Bolivia.
Following a close second in popularity were Pathfinder's new French-language publications, Le Visage changeant de la politique aux Etats-Unis (The Changing Face of U.S. Politics), of which 42 have been sold since October 31st, and La lutte pour un parti prolétarien (The Struggle for a Proletarian Party) by James Cannon in the same format as the English- language Education for Socialists series, 8 1/2" by 11" booklets. Thirty have been sold since late September.
Volunteer sales representatives visited bookstores in Saskatoon and Toronto in the late summer and early fall without receiving any orders at the time. Months later, these stores did send in modest book orders to the distribution center.
"A Halifax bookstore phoned about Leon Trotsky's The Balkan Wars (1912 - 13), and we will be phoning the buyer back with the information they need as well as to point out a few other relevant titles we carry. This is the kind of follow-up work we want to increase," Steele said.
"A new superstore in Toronto features a mural-sized photograph of Jazz musician John Coltrane. We'll be making sure that they see (Frank Kofsky's) John Coltrane and the Jazz Revolution of the 1960s," he added.