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Vol. 75/No. 6      February 14, 2011

 
Volunteers get Pathfinder
books in stores, libraries
 
BY THERESA KENDRICK  
Pathfinder volunteers who place Pathfinder titles in bookstores and libraries began a new North American-wide sales effort February 1 to get 105 orders by June 9. This campaign follows two highly successful drives in 2010 centered on Pathfinder’s new title Malcolm X, Black Liberation, and the Road to Workers Power by Jack Barnes.

These efforts pulled in more than 200 orders. A number of new bookstore accounts were opened, which included several significantly sized orders from bookstores in Black communities. Some 129 libraries ordered 156 copies of the book as a result of meetings with library selectors, book reviews, promotional mailings, conference tables, and advertisements.

The Workers Power book is again at the center of the new effort. Volunteers are planning to feature it along with other Pathfinder titles in visits during Black History Month in February and Women’s History Month in March. Pathfinder’s Arabic-language edition of the Communist Manifesto will also be of interest to library selectors and some bookstore buyers due to the worldwide attention on events in Tunisia and Egypt.

Orders are already coming in. This points to the exciting potential for continued sales of Malcolm X, Black Liberation, and the Road to Workers Power; the new title Soldier of the Cuban Revolution: From the Cane Fields of Oriente to General of the Revolutionary Armed Forces by Luis Alfonso Zayas, available in Spanish and English; and a new book from Cuba distributed by Pathfinder, La victoria estratégica by Fidel Castro.

“You never know when your work is going to pay off,” Susan Berman says of the first order recently netted in Toronto. This week, a year after e-mailing and phone calling for Black History Month 2010, the owner of a bookstore responded with an order for 13 titles (a total of 25 books), including Malcolm X, Black Liberation, and the Road to Workers Power, Capitalism and the Transformation of Africa, and New International no. 6 with the lead article “The Second Assassination of Maurice Bishop.

“People who buy Pathfinder books are always disappointed our store does not have a bigger selection of political titles on hand,” remarked the manager of an Atlanta music and Spanish-language bookstore to volunteer Jim Rogers. The store recently sold a copy of La victoria estratégica by Fidel Castro and had to reserve two more for customers who want it. The manager placed her first order last July, and has since sold 20 books of 11 different titles, including Manifiesto comunista, Che Guevara habla a la juventud, Es posible una revolución socialista en Estados Unidos?, La ultima lucha de Lenin, Playa Girón, and En defensa del marxismo.

After nine months of continuous work, the Malcolm X branch of the San Diego library system now has all of Pathfinder's Malcolm X titles, and has also bought the Workers Power book by Barnes. A discussion has begun with the librarian who agreed to host a special event to discuss the book this spring. Los Angeles-area sales volunteer Nick Castle reports that the visits to San Diego were the high point of their work, including orders and new accounts at a major private college library and a state university bookstore in that city.

From Philadelphia, Mitchel Rosenberg reports that “the most interesting groundbreaking we did was at an internet cafe and money-wiring store oriented to Spanish-speaking immigrants, located in the Italian Market area. The owner, who bought a personal copy of Malcolm X, Black Liberation, and the Road to Workers Power to read herself, is now considering a list of books we proposed as an initial order.”

Pathfinder salespeople are drawing up plans to help widely circulate Soldier of the Cuban Revolution, which provides a firsthand account of the agrarian reform in Cuba and the struggles of workers and peasants in the countryside going back decades before the triumph of the revolution in 1959.  
 
 
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