The six-month campaign is being led by Socialist Workers Party branches and Communist Leagues internationally whose members organize Pathfinder bookstores in their areas and distribute Pathfinder books and pamphlets in their workplaces. The biggest challenge over the remaining three months of the campaign will be meeting the goal to increase sales by Pathfinder bookstores.

It is a joint campaign with supporters of the international communist movement organized in the Pathfinder Printing Project who, in cities around the world, are organizing volunteers to promote Pathfinder books through visits to buyers for commercial bookstores, by encouraging university professors to adopt titles for their courses, and at book fairs.

Joe Swanson, a leader of the Socialist Workers Party in Des Moines, is working with supporters there to make visits in the region. In a phone interview, Swanson mentioned that two supporters, Joanne Murphy and Andrew Pulley, were making a two-day trip to stores within a hundred mile radius of Des Moines. They are visiting bookstores in Waterloo and Cedar Rapids among others.

Swanson recently visited the buyer for Grinnell College, about 50 miles outside Des Moines. It was a first-time meeting. On previous occasions, representatives had only been able to leave some catalogs. Swanson was following up because last November the buyer had ordered more than a dozen Pathfinder titles, including The Founding of the Socialist Workers Party and October 1962: The ‘Missile’ Crisis As Seen From Cuba, by Tomás Diez Acosta.

Pathfinder Bookstores around the world also had significantly increased sales in September. Janice Lynn, a meat packer in Washington, D.C., who tracks the sales of Pathfinder Bookstores in the United States, reported total sales of more than $9,000 in September—$2,000 short of the monthly goal. Lynn is also director of the Pathfinder Bookstore in her city.

In an October 16 interview Gale Shangold, a member of the Printing Project’s sales committee, said, “We did well last month, including sales work at book fairs and festivals. Now the challenge is to follow through on the new opportunities created by the fruitful work done at these book fairs.” To do this she said volunteers organized an October 18---25 target week focused on getting back to the many buyers, bookstore owners and others in the business who were met at the book fairs.

“We should never underestimate the work of regularly following up with bookstores we have been trying to get orders with,” Tom Headley, an Amtrak railroad engineer, told a group of fellow Pathfinder sales volunteers here. Headley reported a bookstore that had been visited for years but never ordered placed an order for $900 last month.

Maceo Dixon, who helps to ship orders from Pathfinder’s Atlanta distribution center, said orders are showing an increase. “Last month, for example,” said Dixon, “we shipped orders to 30 campuses.” Orders from Los Angeles South West College and Harvard University totaled nearly $3,000, he said.

Dixon and Shangold also said that sales opportunities for Pathfinder’s Spanish-language titles continue to increase. “We have noticed in the book trade magazines more reports of large chains like Barnes and Noble that want to expand the titles they carry in Spanish,” Shangold said. She reported that a large Spanish-language distributor recently placed a $3,000 order, getting the sales campaign off to a good start in October.

“The Pathfinder web site, pathfinder-press.com, has increased our ability to reach working people interested in revolutionary politics around the world,” noted Dixon. Last month the distribution center received an inquiry from Zimbabwe and an order from Singapore.  
 
Book festivals
Pathfinder sales teams at book fairs in France, Spain, Sweden, and the United States anchored the increased sales in September.

More than $1,300 worth of books were sold September 21 from the booth set up by the local Pathfinder Bookstore at the annual New York Is Book Country street fair and from a nearby Socialist Workers Party campaign table. Top sellers were 13 copies of different issues of the Marxist magazine New International and the Spanish-language Nueva Internacional, and eight copies of The Working Class and the Transformation of Learning by Jack Barnes. At the Los Angeles Latino Book and Family Festival, more than $360 in Pathfinder titles was purchased. Several of those who bought the socialist literature were also interested in reading about the campaign of Joel Britton, Socialist Workers candidate for governor of California.

At the Fête l’Humanité, a Paris festival in mid-September sponsored by the French Communist Party, 31 titles by Marx, Engels, and Lenin were purchased at the Pathfinder booth. French-language editions of Socialism and Man in Cuba by Che Guevara; Women’s Liberation and the African Freedom Struggle by Thomas Sankara; and The History of American Trotskyism by SWP founder James P. Cannon were among the 98 titles sold. Two high school students from the industrial town of Valenciennes in northern France purchased three pamphlets by Marx and Lenin as well as Socialism and Man in Cuba.

This year marked a record sale for the 11 years Pathfinder has had a presence at the Gothenburg book fair in Sweden, reported Dag Tirsén and Andreas Bergenheim. Fair-goers bought 105 titles along with eight subscriptions to the Militant and three to Perspectiva Mundial. Books and pamphlets on the Cuban Revolution also led the sales with 35 titles sold.The book fair featured a debate between a leader of the Swedish International Liberal Center, which opposes the Cuban Revolution, and the editor of the magazine of the Cuba-Sweden Friendship Association. Many fair visitors stopped by the Pathfinder booth to get books presenting view of leaders of the Cuban Revolution.

The recent political developments in Sweden were also among the topics discussed at the Pathfinder booth. Swedish prime minister Göran Persson, supported by a dominant sector of large Swedish capitalists, had just suffered a defeat in a referendum for the adoption of the euro as the country’s currency. As a result of this discussion one visitor purchased Europe and America—Two Speeches on Imperialism by Leon Trotsky, a central leader of the October 1917 Russian Revolution.

During the book fair Pathfinder volunteers in Gothenburg also set up tables in working-class districts, at the university, and outside a Volvo auto factory. At the end of each of two of his round trips, a bus driver stopped by a table set up at a tram station. He said he wanted “something basic about socialism.” At the end of the third trip he emerged from the bus, money in hand, and purchased Capitalism’s World Disorder by Jack Barnes.  
 
 
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