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Vol. 75/No. 40      November 7, 2011

 
Libraries, bookstores
order Pathfinder books
 
BY MARY ELLEN MARUS  
“Please send a list of 10 titles you would recommend, including titles that deal with unions,” wrote the manager of a major independent bookstore in Los Angeles. He was responding to a mailing promoting books on revolutionary working-class politics by Pathfinder Press. The letter sent to potential commercial buyers and librarians highlighted titles that explain the roots of the worldwide capitalist economic and social crisis.

The mailing is part of Pathfinder’s fall sales effort in the United States and Canada. Orders from bookstores and libraries now total 34. The goal is to win 90 orders by December 12, 45 of these from independent and campus bookstores.

In Vancouver, British Columbia, nine orders have been won so far, including six from high school libraries. The author of this article had a wide-ranging discussion with two high school librarians in Vancouver on how Pathfinder books help explain the connection between what’s happening in world politics and the crisis of capitalism. The librarians talked about the fight by teachers at the school against a wage freeze and ordered 16 books.

According to Floyd Fowler in Atlanta, a librarian there is interested in organizing a meeting on Pathfinder’s upcoming book Making a Revolution Within the Revolution: From the Santiago Underground to the Federation of Cuban Women.

Based on Pathfinder promotional work in New York, a librarian at the 125th Street Library in Harlem is helping to organize a meeting on the roots of the economic crisis featuring Steve Clark, managing editor of New International, a magazine of Marxist politics and theory distributed by Pathfinder Press.

Speaking with salesperson Katy LeRougetel, the political science buyer at the University of Quebec library in Montreal ordered the French versions of the New International series, Teamster Rebellion and The Communist Manifesto, as well as the entire Communist International series.

A new civil rights museum in Greensboro, North Carolina, in a former Woolworth’s store where a landmark sit-in for Black rights occurred in 1960, ordered $400 worth of books. Since opening in February 2010, they have sold 40 copies of Malcolm X, Black Liberation, and the Road to Workers Power.

In Miami the owner of a Haitian bookstore ordered the French editions of The Changing Face of U.S. Politics: Working-Class Politics and the Trade Unions by Jack Barnes and Teamster Rebellion by Farrell Dobbs.  
 
 
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