Book Orders

Wheelock Books orders any course materials your professors need for their classes. We work with hundreds of distributors and publishers, both foreign and domestic. We stock used and new books, imported/foreign titles, scholarly journals, educational supplies, and can track down hard-to-find titles as well.

• Deadlines
• Book Order Process
• Pricing

An email containing the next term's order deadline is sent to all department administrators in the third or fourth week of the current term. The deadline is usually about eight weeks before the start of the next term but varies based on holidays, length of breaks, and number of courses being offered. Please contact us anytime to check on the deadline for upcoming terms!

Late Orders

We always continue accepting orders after the deadline, but book arrivals to the store may be delayed, especially if the book is out of stock at the publisher or needs to be imported. We'll stay in contact and let you know when you can expect books ordered late.

Foreign Book Orders

The foreign book deadline is usually two weeks before the regular book deadline, or about ten weeks out from the start of the term. This gives us time to contact our distributors to check availability and compare prices, then order and receive the books. Some foreign books, Spanish books especially, can take upwards of eight weeks to receive once the order is placed. These books are often not returnable once ordered, so we ask that professors commit to the books on their order once we have begun processing them.

Return to top

To order books, simply email wheelockbooks@wheelockbooks.com with the following information:

1. Course information including department, number, and title
2. Professor(s) name(s)
3. Estimated enrollment
4. Book title(s)
5. Book author(s)
6. Book ISBN number(s)
7. Book publisher(s)
8. Designation of whether each book is required or optional for students to buy

You may download our standardized form if you would prefer a structured template, but as long as you provide the information above we can process your order.

After we receive your order, we will email back a confirmation that we have received the order.

We then call the publisher of each book and determine whether the book is available. Within two weeks of your order, we will send you an email confirmation of all the books for your class which contains any pertinent notes. This is where we will communicate to you that a book is out of print, or out of stock, or that a new edition is available. Our format for this email confirmation follows (with some helpful notes):

• Author:
• Title:
• Publisher Abbreviation:
• Publisher Name:
• Publisher Phone#: This is for use in obtaining desk copies.
• ISBN:
• Status: Available/Out of Stock with note on due date/Out of Print, etc.
• Comments: If the book is anything other than available, we will use this field to give you detailed notes on the book's status and our plans for ordering it.
• Edition:
• Year:
• Required/Optional:
• Price:
• Binding:
• Order Quantity:

We ask that you review these confirmations carefully to make sure that there are no errors. Please pay particular attention to the ISBN, edition, and to our notes in the comments field. If you find a discrepancy in the ISBN, please let us know. A discrepancy of even one digit will mean that an incorrect book is being ordered. It is much easier to correct errors during the confirmation process than after the books have arrived and are sitting on the shelves.

Once books are confirmed to you, we first order as many used copies as we can through our different used book distributors. We then order new copies. We will notify you as any problems arise. If you would prefer that we order solely new copies of one or all of the books for a given class, please let us know and we would be happy to oblige.

Books begin arriving toward the end of the preceding term and continue to arrive during interim; it takes about 10 days to put books up on the shelf and price them. The weekend before the first week of the term, we will email you a pdf file containing the title and price of each book that we have in stock, and updates on any books that we are still waiting to receive. We ask that you carefully review this pdf to make sure that there are no errors.

We keep accurate and easily accessible records of orders for Dartmouth College classes for past years. Should you have any questions about books that have been used in the past, please contact us! We're happy to provide you with missing pieces of information on titles you might be interested in.

Return to top

All our new titles are discounted between 5 and 35%, and all of our used titles are discounted between 25 and 60% to all customers. We do not require that customers subscribe to a membership program to take advantage of our discounts. We are also competitive with online pricing.

We hope this information is helpful to you in the book ordering process. Please do not hesitate to contact us by phone (603-643-6567) or by email (wheelockbooks@wheelockbooks.com) if you have any questions or suggestions for us!

Return to top