Beleaguered Bookseller Knows Whom to Blame: Oxfam

An Oxfam Books near the British Museum in London.

By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
writing in The New York Times, September 2, 2009

SALISBURY, England — It is David versus Goliath, in tweeds. A small secondhand bookseller in this quaint, storied old town last month took on Oxfam, the behemoth of international charities, founded in Britain. Moral conundrums aside, the incident revealed a fading patch of British culture.

Solent News & Photo Agency
Marc Harrison and Mitchell at Ellwood Books, now closed.

The brouhaha began after The Salisbury Journal called on Marc Harrison, 42, a ponytailed former Roman Catholic priest who, until this summer when he could no longer pay his mortgage, ran Ellwood Books on Winchester Street, a modest commercial strip just beyond the center of town. The newspaper wanted to photograph Mr. Harrison’s bearded collie, Mitchell, a fixture in Salisbury, dozing in the shop’s big front window to accompany an article about failing businesses around town.
Seizing the opportunity, Mr. Harrison told the newspaper’s reporter that he blamed his store’s demise on the Oxfam bookstore, which opened not quite two years ago on a main shopping street nearby and is one of 130 Oxfam secondhand bookstores now operating around the country. “Oxfam killed my bookshop” was the headline in the next day’s Journal, after which The Guardian devoted a full page to Ellwood Books, with the rest of the national news media swiftly following suit and, as usual in Britain, taking sides.

Oxfam, the 67-year-old Oxford-based confederation of multinational organizations, spends more than $600 million a year around the world fighting poverty and famine, providing emergency relief, combating climate change and discrimination. Aside from what it takes in through cash gifts, it raises money via hundreds of retail shops selling donated clothing and other items. It’s now, as it likes to boast, the largest secondhand book dealer in Europe, which isn’t saying a lot, if you consider how few secondhand booksellers have more than a single shop, much less 130.
Even so, grossing $130 million from its 700 retail stores, $32 million of that from its bookshops, Oxfam, from Mr. Harrison’s inflamed perspective, has become, as he told The Salisbury Journal and then everyone else, “the Tesco of the secondhand book world,” comparing the charity to the giant British retail chain.

Read the full piece at NYT.