TEXTBOOK MATERIAL

With a near-adequate book allowance from the Veterans Administration as backing, most undergraduates scrimp little to pay for their instructor's favorite tome. The problem today is to find the books authorized for purchase. Before the war, the faculty could do little to help students in the search for the printed word because the problem was basically financial. Now, however, the task is not to locate the money needed for book purchases, but to search out a store able to fill the demand for popular texts.

Most instructors have helped. Those who have been alive to the current shortage of books have reacted to it. Many have foregone their preferences to order what is readily available; others, cooperating to the fullest extent with bookstores in the Square, have sent in their list months ahead of the customary deadline. There has been more coordination between the faculty and the booksellers than ever before.

The same minority, however, which has always refused to pick out its textbooks for the next term's classes until the day before registration, has continued to do so. Despite all the publicity, picturing in graphic detail the present difficulty in obtaining books, a few wilful men continue to act as if 1947 were 1938. The pipeline between publisher and student is slowly filling but, it still does not allow for complacency from those who decide what their student's reading will be for the following term. There just aren't enough books to go around in the unprecedented rush for the colleges. In many cases, the question is one of beating the other fellow to the publisher.

Five years ago, selecting titles at the last minute could be passed off as a harmless eccentricity. At the most, it would merely delay books for the length of time it took mail from Cambridge to reach the publisher. This happy situation no longer holds true. Dilatory professors may not only hold up the student unduly, since stocks are not complete, but may keep him from getting the text at all. There is no need for this reluctance in picking out texts now, nor has there ever been an entirely adequate one. Some courses have had their February lists in since October. Since the choice is no longer in many cases between a good book and a better book, but between a good book and whatever comes along, regardless of adequacy, the usual excuse has lost its validity.