By Sept. 24, five days after registration last Fall, a large number of students -- more than usual -- were walking up to clerks in the Coop annex and complaining they couldn't find the textbooks they needed on the shelves. A count at the end of the day showed they were right: almost 1,000 out of 3,000 titles on the reading lists were missing.

The Coop did nothing to hide its chagrin. "The situation isn't good and there's no point in minimizing it," Presdent Stanley F. Teele told the annual meeting of Coop members a month later. And, at the meeting, Teele heard from the Harvard Undergraduate Council one of the angriest statements ever directed at the Coop by a student organization:

"The Council feels compelled to lodge the strongest complaint over the inefficiency and chaos reigning in the Coop's textbook area...If the Coop would demonstrate the same enthusiasm for the comprehensive stocking of texts as it does for pajamas and shaving lotions, it would be performing a far more valuable function...[It is] the Coop's responsibility to provide honest answers and to make a far more determined effort."

Arguing that inefficiency within the store is not to blame, Teele and other Coop officials in the three months since the meeting have provided their own answer. If it is correct, the Coop will need help from a number of sources within the University this term to prevent another massive textbook shortage next Fall.

Last year, they point out, the Coop took its first step toward filling the Fall shelves at the beginning of May, when it sent a form letter to all professors teaching courses in the Fall and asked for a list of their required books. At the bottom was stamped "Early Information is Important!" The reason for the exclamation mark was simple: it would take publishers three to six weeks to ship the textbooks that the Coop ordered.

Less than half of the forms had been sent back by the end of the Spring term. "That was understandable," John G. Morrill, Coop general manager, commented in a recent interview. "They wanted a little free time to look over the publishers' lists, see what was new in their field." The Coop, therefore, did not bother the professors who had not returned their lists.

By the middle of August, close to the deadline for ordering books that would arrive before school opened, only a few more forms had been sent back in -- much less than had been returned in previous summers. "Second notices" were mailed by the Coop -- and most of them laid unanswered in the offices of professors who were away.

The Coop had less than two-thirds of the forms on Sept. 11. Secretaries were put on the phone full-time and told to talk to anyone -- professors, department heads, section men -- who knew the reading lists. By Sept. 24 the Coop had ordered texts for only three-quarters of the 825 courses it was expected to supply.

But by that time another, more traditional problem was depleting the shelves. Too few books had been ordered in a number of courses; as they sold out, title by title, blue tags were put up indicating they had been reordered. But students wondered why the supply of so many textbooks had been exhausted so soon. "Because estimates of course sizes are just educated guesses," Morrill answered. "Even the professors who sent us their own estimates could be pretty far off."

While ordering books, the Coop generally asked for enough to supply the number of students who took the course the previous year -- the same way the Registrar's office assigned classrooms, and with the same predictable amount of error. For new courses it relied on professors' estimates or simply made a guess.

By Sept. 24, the Coop knew it had guessed wrong in every course where texts had been sold out. But it still did not know how wrong. The Registrars' office, which compiled its final list of course enrollments in October, would not give the Coop any preliminary figures. A text re-order was occasionally held up while a Coop secretary tried to contact professors for the enrollment in their courses -- but they often could not be reached.

The result was that many students, such as a large number in Soc Sci 8, were left without books for more than half a term. The Coop ordered 350 copies of several Soc Sci 8 texts in the summer -- about the number that were bought the year before. But the year before there had been a limit on course enrollment; last Fall, without a limit, enrollment soared to 549. The Coop didn't know when it made its first re-order, nor its second. It found out in time for the third.

There was no one to rescue the Coop from this kind of mistake -- not even a publisher. "We used to be able to tell the publishers we had a special problem, ask for a book to be shipped in a week or ten days and get it," Morrill said. "But too many firms were merging and moving away from our area. It wasn't so easy anymore."

Did the Coop add to the delay after books arrived from the publisher? Only slightly, Coop officials argue -- their triplicate filing system sometimes slowed down transfer of books from packages to shelves, but was efficient in the long run. And, if students didn't complain about a sold-out book, then the clerks didn't always notice it immediately, delaying its re-order. But the clerks, Coop officials insist, were and are as good as the staff of any Boston department store; what may have looked like "chaos" in the annex was the necessary moving of books.

Coop officials also permitted students from Boston College, Boston University and other schools to come to the Coop for texts their own bookstores didn't have. "We expected them and counted them in when we ordered," Morrill explained. "They weren't stealing Harvard books, and they were paying for the privilege of shopping here, since they didn't earn patronage refunds."