Friday February 19 2020

Looking Back: Travelling Bookshop

An experiment in getting Church of Scotland literature out to the members, from February 1947

Travelling Bookshop

A NEW EXPERIMENT

NEW and more attractive literature is being produced by the Church, but unless this literature can be made easily available to the Church member, no matter how new or how attractive it is, it will not increase the knowledge or the interest of members in the manifold activities of the Church.

The Foreign Mission Committee, faced with this problem of bottleneck between the production and the consumption of literature, has recently purchased a tea canteen and had it fitted up as a travelling bookshop.

The travelling bookshop, which carries a selection of books and pamphlets published by other Committees of the Church as well as Foreign Mission literature, is being used particularly in rural parishes to bring information regarding the activities of the Church to the doors of the members of the Church.

A missionary on furlough is in charge of this van as driver and bookseller. A week or more may be spent going round a parish or two adjoining parishes displaying and selling the literature in company with the minister of the parish. Visits to the schools in the district can be arranged as part of the morning activities.

The portable “Church and the World” Exhibition and lantern and slides are also carried in the van, and evening meetings can be arranged at which the missionary will speak of his work and show the lantern slides and the Exhibition.

This experiment in education by means of modern colportage – a means which has been left too long to organisations outside the Church and sometimes antagonistic to the Church – will have the enthusiastic approval of all who believe that increased interest and support can come through increased knowledge and appreciation of what the Church is doing at home and abroad.

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