The Press SATURDAY, MAY 9, 1959. Book Imports

Press, Volume XCVIII, Issue 28890, 9 May 1959, Page 12

The Press SATURDAY, MAY 9, 1959. Book Imports

The Government has not handled book imports well under its import control system. At the outset, there was no evidence of abnormal stocks in the country; and current imports were no more than required to meet the normal demands of the reading public. Nevertheless, the Government cut imports of reading matter by 40 per cent.—nearer 50 per cent, when price increases and the rise in population are taken into account. A few months after making this decision the Government acknowledged that the restrictions were too harsh; public libraries and university libraries were promised that their demands for books and periodicals would be supplied by special licences issued ‘on the recommendation of the National Library Service’s bureau for library book imports. Apparently the Government, while judging it desirable to keep up supplies to public libraries, saw no comparable need to maintain the flow of books through ordinary trade channels. When import controls generally were relaxed a little in April, the additional allocations for books

were confined to technical and educational publications. The average reader received no direct relief although he was apparently meant to derive some benefit from an alteration in categories. The No. 1 category (technical and scholarly books) was widened to include “ cultural ” works. Noone seems to have given a thought to the difficulty of defining cultural works; and it is not surprising to learn that the Government’s “ dispense- “ tion ” has opened up a whole new field for the exercise of bureaucratic virtuosity. An Auckland report speaks of a book importer who has a case of books by Somerset Maugham and Nevil Shute held up because the customs officials cannot decide whether these authors are cultural or not. The Government would dp well to put an end to this kind of nonsense. The only satisfactory solution is to free books entirely from import control. The drain on overseas funds involved is comparatively small; and the nation’s reading should be one of the last rather than the first sacrifices to financial stringency.