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One of the staples of every book fair is the information table where you'll generally find catalogs provided by sellers, notices of upcoming book fairs, advertisements for services, and the ever present BOOK SOURCE MONTHLY trade journal. The small glossy magazine has been around since 1985 and is produced by John C. Huckans of Cazenovia, NY.
Along with a 2000 subscriber base, the journal is distributed free at almost every bookfair in order to provide visibility for the advertisers. It's a journal familiar throughout the US and the United Kingdom and tailored specifically to the book trade. Huckans' background in the antiquarian book trade enabled him to see what he thought were flaws in the traditional journal in existence at the time.
"They weren't using what I considered good ideas," he said. "This was just before the Internet, really the World Wide Web, came into existence. I had been transmitting text files, long before windows." Unlike his competitor at the time, Huckans welcomed advertising from online book search services and took ads when Alibris was Interlock and even before, when the site was BookQuest. "I think we were the first to advertise abe.com." He explains, "We embraced the Internet."
The competitor (the AB Bookman) did not and refused to consider including advertisements that promoted online bookselling. Consequently it is no more and Book Source Monthly is still going strong.
The journal is printed every two months with much of the work sub-contracted out to printers and the like. The company maintains a Web site: booksourcemonthly.com that houses back editorials and offers useful information to booksellers and collectors.
Huckans thinks the days of selling a great number of books on the Internet may be lessening and expresses the thought that sellers are not cataloging as many for sale as they had. He still believes in the Internet as a wonderful resource that has transformed the industry.
http://www.booksourcemonthly.com
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