I thank the International Association of Law Libraries for your warm hospitality. I am glad to have had the chance to meet with you and learn about your work, and I wish you well as you meet the challenges of the technological era where law books are giving way to internet links.

Book Publishing in the English speaking Caribbean is a relatively recent phenomenon. Prior to the 1960s there were sporadic attempts by individuals and even large firms like the Gleaner Company's Pioneer Press in Jamaica, but some semblance of sustained publishing activity did not come to the region until the post-independence period. In that first immediate post-independence period, the initiative to set up publishing operations came from British educational publishers who established either wholly-owned subsidiaries or went into partnerships with local business interests like the Collins/Sangster imprint in Jamaica. For the most part, these were token operations. They were also essentially the companies’ marketing and sales outlets as all publishing decisions, as well as editorial, design and production work, remained in the UK. Consequently there was no skills transfer or structured training in any aspect of book publishing.

In this presentation I shall be making reference particularly to the islands of the Eastern Caribbean, which are the jurisdictions I visit on a regular basis. I shall exclude Belize, which in the bookselling world we consider to be the province of Central American dealers, and also Guyana, for which no-one, I am afraid, seems to want to take responsibility. It's a difficult place to reach, and there's little to buy when you finally get there.

I must first say that I have been a book vendor for a relatively short time compared to my partner René Grullón. For 25 years prior I was an academic librarian. Hence, this paper is a collaborative effort with René who has been in the business of providing materials to university libraries for close to 15 years.

The inauguration of the Caribbean Court of Justice in April 2005 represented the culmination of aspirations in earlier years to establish a court of last resort for the Caribbean Region to replace the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council (The Privy Council) which was and still is for most Commonwealth Caribbean jurisdictions, the final court. These aspirations were endorsed by the legal profession through the Organisation of Commonwealth Caribbean Bar Associations (OCCBA) over thirty years ago, although the idea of such a court was not an original one having been contemplated early in the last century. The court was envisaged as a Caribbean Court of Appeal with an appellate jurisdiction hearing appeals from domestic appellate courts and an original jurisdiction to interpret regional treaties.

Good afternoon. It is a pleasure to be here with you at your convention. I will try to be as brief as possible, which is what every last speaker should do. By now, you must be really tired. Although I feel your pain, my topic, however, will not ease your pain. From some perspectives, it is one of the most metaphysical subjects human mind has devised. I will try to make it as straightforward as possible. That is what I tried to do in the description of my talk, which is printed on your program. I tried to synthesize what I would say, so that reasonable men and women could decide that the beach, the pool or the casino would be more worthwhile enterprises.