Librarians' Christian Fellowship

 

London and Bloomsbury looked really good for the LCF annual conference. Trees were coming into leaf and blossoming against the blue sky scattered with traditional puffy white clouds above the stately, academic surrounds of Cartwright Gardens!

Hughes Parry Hall

After coffee we moved into the short worship session led by Louise Manners and the AGM followed. Then we sat back to enjoy the input from Tony Jasper, writer, broadcaster, actor, playwright and man of many talents and even wider interests. He gave us a rollicking ride through his varied experiences and his thoughts on multifarious topics loosely connected to books and libraries.

Talking of his own publications, a biography of Cliff Richard and his best known title Jesus in a Pop Culture as well as innumerable articles, hymn collections and plays led into the world of publishing. Tony bemoaned the fact that rejection letters now come from the Marketing Department rather than an editor. The Editor's lunch is apparently a thing of the past. Tony has affectionate anecdotes about Priscilla Collins (erstwhile editor of Collins' Religious List) and Peg's Bag (brown and battered but containing smelly cheese and wee drams) which were produced by an editor at the BBC to seal contracts. No longer the province of the 'scholar and gentleman' the publishing trade has changed. The influence of the commercial media is very noticeable. Bookshop chains encourage publishers to produce what they can easily sell. Christian bookshops seem to be in retreat but the new media provide new opportunities.

This talk seemed to have interesting resonances for LCF where we are considering what changes we need to make to help members continue their Christian mission in our profession. Next year's annual lecture speaker will be Dave Roberts, author of The Twilight Gospel which draws attention to the Zeitgeist which has given rise to Stephenie Meyer's very successful Vampire novels, which vaunt 'appearance' rather than 'substance'.

LCF President, Gordon Harris,
with Tony Jasper, Graham Hedges and Eddie Olliffe.

Eddie Olliffe, our afternoon speaker, spoke for a sister profession whose fortunes are even more heavily dependent on the prevailing economic climate than are those of the library world. Bookselling is a volatile market at the best of times, and Eddie has seen some of the worst of times.

The first Christian bookshop in the UK opened in Derby two hundred years ago, and was soon followed by another one in Bristol, but it wasn’t until the 20th century that Christian bookselling really took off in a big way, aided in part by the significant growth of SPCK bookshops in the 1930s. From 1976 to 1996 some new organisations came on the scene, and names like Wesley Owen began to trip off our tongues. They and SPCK stayed in the lead in the 1990s, but in the last decade their dominance of the market has been taken over by the initially much more low-key Christian Literature Crusade (CLC), which had been established as a missionary organisation in 1941 with the aim of proclaiming the gospel through the distribution of Christian literature, both in the UK and abroad.

The last few years have seen a revolution in UK Christian bookselling, marked by mergers and closures. Most secular retailers reckon they need over six hundred outlets to be counted as a major UK retailer. Not surprisingly, Christian retailers have never come near this figure, and nowadays their number is declining, with about one hundred and fifty doing a viable trade.

Even commercial Christian bookselling can have a missional nature – a Christian witness in the high street, offering a weekday focus not provided by the church, but Eddie has long wondered if specialist Christian bookshops have been a blind alley – should Christian bookselling have been part of mainstream bookselling? Does missionary activity prejudice bookselling activity? More interaction between the church and Christian bookshops is needed, plus a greater Christian presence in the mass media.

Looking more widely, there seems to have been a decline in reading and book-buying in general, not just in the Christian context. However the figures need to be read carefully. There has been only a marginal 0.5% decline in 2009 sales figures. The average price of a book was £7.43, with one in five books bought in the UK being sold by a supermarket; but apart from that, independent bookshops are doing much better than the big chains, as they have the flexibility to cater for a specific market. Figures for 2010 haven’t begun well, and the pattern is the same in the US, although electronic books are bucking the trend.

The enormous number of titles published each year (in 2009 the UK had more new titles than ever before) means there are fewer customers per title, and enormous problems for booksellers, who have to choose what to stock. This has encouraged print-on-demand and digital publishing, with an increase in Internet retailing (now the norm for many people), digital downloading, and a growing market in e-book readers.

So what’s the future for Christian bookshops? What they can offer that supermarkets and web-sites can’t is an ‘experience’, which if done well, can be a winner; it’s not just about selling books, but a sense of community and a spirit of inclusion. Faith shouldn’t be a barrier but a door. Bookselling chains have limited flexibility and high central costs, whereas the independents can tailor their shops to the local customer.

Conference delegates chatting over lunch at Hughes Parry Hall

This is an abbreviated version of a report written by Mary Barker and Diana Guthrie for Christian Librarian.