THE BOOK SERVICE (like the Scholarships programme) predates the Campaign, was the brainchild of Jim Sutton, Douglas Chesterton and George Lunn, and started by collecting second-hand Christian titles and offering them to churches and (more particularly) theological colleges in the Third World.
The input came mainly from two sources. One was the Ranfurley Library which operated a similar scheme for educational purposes and found it convenient to offload everything to do with religion to Feed the Minds. The other was the libraries of deceased ministers and missionaries.
Books were stored in various central London locations and Jim Hardiman administered it with the help of a typewriter. Destinations depended very largely on his knowledge of ‘what would be suitable and where’ though lists were circulated from time to time to enable overseas partners to make their choices. At worst donors saw it as a useful home for ‘old stuff’ but the system quickly refined itself and with the advent of the computer in the 80s developed into a professional service with three clear principles.
- The purpose was library development. Books were not normally sent to individuals though 'libraries' was often loosely interpreted to include but church and training centres.
- The emphasis was on theological books of significance. Pop religion and ephemeral paperbacks were excluded. Age was no barrier because many superfluous to requirements in the UK were still needed to fill gaps in libraries overseas, to replace books out-of-print, copies worn out or lost, and sometimes simply as duplicates.
- The choice was that of the overseas partners. To facilitate this a list of a available titles was circulated two or three times a year to several hundred contacts on the principle of ‘first-come first served’ with some of the mailings staggered so as to avoid the obvious advantage otherwise given to those with the best postal service.
Titles, mostly vetted before acceptance, were housed in the office and the Service was run on a shoe string by volunteers, the main costs being those of producing and circulating the catalogue and dispatching the books. Publishers anxious to offload their left-overs in quantity, as a form of overseas aid, were discouraged. No books were purchased for the service and donors were expected to cover the cost of getting them to the headquarters.
In the 90s the Service became more pro-active in actually securing titles on requests from overseas with a budget of about £6,000 but still mainly postage. The number and quality of the books sent out improved, institutions which never responded were weeded out and new ones added. Olga Davies began working on the Service one day a week and inroduced a new professionalism. Change of headquarters from shared premises with SPCK to independent FTM offices in Causton Street led to a temporary suspension but normal service was resumed in 2004 with the Book Service relocated to Bradford where it continued to be staffed by volunteers.