Contents

• Home
• News
  • Riot police invade Zimbabwe Mothers’ Union service
  • Quarter of children depressed
  • Cover the furniture and map the droppings, says bat guide
  • Couples ‘pushed to breaking point’ by debt, says charity
  • Former SPCK shops to be auctioned
  • Hiltz asks Venables to stay away. He doesn’t
  • Dr Williams: Faith is an ally of pluralism
  • Lords back gay-hatred amendment
  • Stick with the creeds, Pope tells American Christians
  • Sad flight
  • ‘Sad day’ for city as St George’s Day parade is cancelled
  • Judge rules thief must sell stamps
  • In memory
  • Church laptops stolen during sermon on theft
  • Methodist Publishing faces axe
  • £4 million to be spent on young
  • Bird’s eye
  • Greed overtakes opium in polls
  • MU members team up with TAP Fund runner
  • Anchored
  • Bishop warns: scientists will want more time on embryos
  • Swirling theme
  • Glittering
  • Red Cross urges: check first aid under new law
  • Danger of theme park in Mid-East
  • News in Brief
  • Heroine, aged ten, in Ugandan blaze
  • Priest told he has no flock left
  • Engaging
  • Foreign News In Brief
• Question of the week
• Comment
• Letters
• Real Life
• Features
• Faith
• Humour and crossword
• Pastimes
• Books
• Arts
• Media
• Gazette
• PDF

back to News

previous story  |  next story

Methodist Publishing faces axe

by Bill Bowder

THE METHODIST bookshop in Methodist Church House, Marylebone Road, London, closed its doors last Friday for the last time. Its owner, the Methodist Publishing House (MPH), a descendant of the Book Rooms of earlier Methodism, is undergoing restructuring that could lead to its being closed, too, and absorbed into the Methodist Connexion. MPH has lost about £800,000 for two years running. In 2005, the Publishing House had prepared a strategic mission plan to take it to 2010. But in 2006 it made a loss of £889,731 against an income of £2,165,845. Losses in 2007 are again expected to be about £800,000. MPH had lost £226,703 in 2005. A new computer system had made meaningful financial information unavailable to the Board, it said in last year’s annual report. A Methodist spokesman said that the bookshop closure was part of a money-saving exercise in advance of a decision by the Methodist Conference in July to close the publishing company. Its core business, publishing hymn-books and worship books, Conference reports, and the Methodist Directory, was still profitable, he said. But third-party agreements that MPH had made were losing money. The publishing house would continue to sell its existing publications and honour its contracts with its authors, the spokesman said. The chairman of the MPH board, Eric Jarvis, said he felt deeply for the people whose jobs would disappear. “But we simply could not go on as we were, sustaining heavy losses.” In future, mph books can be ordered through www.mph.org.uk.

back to News

back to top

previous story  |  next story