Salient. Victoria University Students' Paper. Vol. 26, No. 7. Tuesday, June 18, 1963
Mitchell Blasts Bookshop
Mitchell Blasts Bookshop
" Not worth the space" is Armour Mitchell's comment on the proposed University bookshop. He felt that the city bookshops' service could not be bettered, and it distressed him to see so much work being done in what he considered to be the wrong direction.
A Committee investigated the bookshop proposal in 1961-1962 and decided the Activities Room would be the only possible site for such a shop, and that it would be too small for the selling and storage of a large variety of books. It said a student-run bookshop could give neither much lower prices nor much better service than city shops. The Activities Room is wanted for the proposed Student Health Service, among other things.
Many difficulties in obtaining books were, he said, directly attributable to VUW staff members who changed their textbooks about a week before the Calendar was printed. Ordering time for textbooks is about three months, so city shops would have anything up to £500 tied up in useless books. They might be able to sell these off at cost in a later sale, but meanwhile the £500 has not earned anything. This sort of business leads to conservative buying by shops.
Agencies had been considered, but both single-agency and consortium arrangements had disadvantages.
A single agency would give no guarantee of reasonable prices, and a consortium would pose problems in allotting quotas where two or more firms had agencies for the same publisher.
A student-organised bookshop at Canterbury was run out of business by the city's principal bookshop, which now has the Canterbury agency.
Mitchell suggested the possibility of supplying the SCM bookstall with new books might be investigated and that in any case they should be consulted.