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400 My Independent Bookshops Launch in the UK

May 8, 2014 By achuka Leave a Comment

goodereaderMy Independent Bookshop is a new initiative in the UK that allows any reader to set up their shop with twelve books at a time on their shelves—changing the display as often as they choose by season, genre or simply their mood. The owners of the shelf can earn a 8% commission from their favorite indie bookstore.  Today the service gets out of beta and over 400 bookshops are opening in the UK.

via 400 My Independent Bookshops Launch in the UK.

 

The ‘bookshops’ opening today, following a month-long invite-only beta period, include several high-profile authors and book lovers from Irvine Welsh to Simon Mayo to Carys Bray, many of the UK’s independent bookshops from South London stalwart Dulwich Books to the UK’s smallest island bookshop, Hayling Island Books, and hundreds of specially selected VIP readers.

Filed Under: Blog, Books Tagged With: books, bookselling, bookshops, independent, readers

Slightly Foxed – Indie Bookshop Feature #7

April 14, 2014 By achuka 4 Comments

SlightlyFoxed

Slightly Foxed on the Gloucester Road could not be easier to find. Come out of Gloucester Road tube station, turn right, and you will see it on a corner on the opposite side of the street.

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There had been a very well-regarded second-hand bookshop here for many years (known simply as Gloucester Road Bookshop) before the niche publisher, Slightly Foxed, celebrated their sixth successful year by taking it over in 2009. Since being taken over the shop now sells new books as well as old.

Unusually for an independent bookshop, the Slightly Foxed website is excellent and kept right up-to-date. At the time of my visit, a newly-appointed assistant manager, Charlotte Colwill, who had been in post for less than a month, was already included on the website’s informative staff info page. Charlotte had been appointed to take over from Aimi Gallienne, who is leaving the shop to have a baby but plans to return, albeit in a different role.

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The shop is managed by Tony Smith, who began his bookselling career at Hall’s second-hand bookshop in Tunbridge Wells. He was reading English Literature at York University and the vacation job meant he could find texts for his course and be paid as well. Tony began working there in 1987, just after the death of well-known antiquarian bookseller Harry Pratley, who had been at Hall’s for many years and whose personal collection was sold at Sotheby’s for more than £3 million.

Smith graduated in 1989, but continued working at Hall’s until 1994, when he enrolled on a diploma course in antiquarian bookselling at UCL, run by the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association. The course required work experience and Smith approached Heywood Hill, whose manager, John Saumarez Smith, he already knew from his buying tours in the South East. As luck or fate had it, a Heywood Hill bookseller  had just left and Tony found his fortnight’s work experience turned into a full-time job.

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He stayed at Heywood Hill for nearly fifteen years, and clearly remembers his time there fondly. “The customers at Heywood Hill were tremendously loyal and enjoyed the atmosphere of a literary cocktail party deftly managed by John. The staff were notable for their steadfastness (John was there for 43 years and two of my colleagues clocked up over 20 years each). We each had our enthusiasms and provided a bespoke service to a wide-ranging clientele from Hong Kong, Sydney, Santiago, New York and all parts of the UK.”

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John Saumarez Smith had left Heywood Hill in 2008. As a cousin of John Murray, he was acquainted with Gail Pirkis,  an editor at John Murray before leaving to set up Slightly Foxed, the literary quarterly. John also knew Nick Dennys, a nephew of Graham Greene, owner of the Gloucester Road bookshop, who was keen to move out of London at just the point when Slightly Foxed was looking to own a bookshop. John brought things together and Gail offered Tony the role of manager, which he eagerly accepted.

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Tony leaves new stock selection to his assistant manager, and concentrates on curating the second-hand and antiquarian stock. The high-ceilinged, big-windowed ground-floor of the bookshop is full of light, with its corner aspect allowing it to suck in sunlight from two directions. In contrast, the basement, where the majority of second-hand titles are shelved, gets no natural light at all – but the artificial lighting illuminates the stock very invitingly (and that can’t be said for a lot of second-hand bookshop basements).

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“One of the best things about my job,” Tony says,  “is the unpredictability of when and where the stock will come. I never know if the next phone call, email or visitor will lead to the chance to make an offer on some wonderful books.” The shop is situated in an affluent, bookish neighbourhood and this means that he can be selective in what he buys. “Any independent bookshop’s stock will reflect the enthusiasms and prejudices of its staff and this bookshop is no exception. I buy all the second hand and antiquarian stock and continue the routine we inherited from the Gloucester Road bookshop of marking the books with a letter code to identify how long it has been here. When a section is tired or overflowing, any of us can mark down the oldest stock to try to encourage the customers to buy it. I don’t consider my pricing to be the highest in the business – far from it – but, clearly, if the customers have been refusing my idea of its worth for six months or a year, then it needs to come down and be turned over.”

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On the afternoon of my visit there was a varied mix of sporadic visitors. One lady was looking for a black-and-white A-Z. A man checked the art stock downstairs, but had been drawn into the shop by a title in the window display, which he asked to see before leaving. He popped back outside to point to it, so that Charlotte (pictured below) could fetch the right one. Book sold!

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“The shop windows are a useful way of informing passers-by of the range and depth of our stock,” says Tony. “They are changed at least once a week. We also have shelves of £1 books which we put out on the pavement in good weather which also help to stop people in their tracks. It’s all part of making the shop as attractive and inviting as possible. I believe in bookshop bookselling, directly sharing enthusiasms with the customers, and would be sad if that ever came to an end in this country.”
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The shop continues to be owned by Slightly Foxed publishing company, which is now much more than merely a publisher of a literary quarterly. The shop stocks back issues of the magazine, and also copies of the Slightly Foxed growing catalogue of books. Tony’s own favourite is A House in Flanders by Michael Jenkins, a love letter to the magic of France.
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The synergy between shop and publisher is one reason the website is so impressive. As Tony puts it, “We benefit from the association and have shared the costs as the websites (shop and publisher have two separate but connected sites) have changed and developed. We try to make the online experience as attractive and simple as possible.”
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The shop has been Slightly Foxed for five years now. The quarterly, on the other hand, celebrates its 10th birthday this year.The publisher’s website says, “During the past decade we’ve acquired enthusiastic readers all over the globe, and we’re delighted to say that we still have a good number who’ve been with us since our very first issue. Once people start taking Slightly Foxed they tend to become addicted… Perhaps this is because Slightly Foxed is unashamedly about enjoyment – 96 entertainingly written and elegantly illustrated pages of personal recommendations for books that have influenced, touched or perhaps simply amused the people who write about them – the kind of books people keep beside their beds or take down from their shelves from time to time, just for the pleasure of re-reading them. It’s more like a well-read friend than a literary magazine, introducing its readers to forgotten books and giving them refreshing new angles on old favourites.”Pick up a back copy when you pay the bookshop a visit, or go online and order the latest issue.
SlightlyFoxedMag

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The shop also stocks all titles published so far in handsome limited-edition reissues of the ‘Carey family’ series of children’s books by Ronald Welch, who won the Carnegie Medal in 1956 for the first title in the series. Altogether there are twelve titles in the sequence, which follows one family through from the time of the Third Crusade in the 12th century to the Great War at the start of the 20th century. The fourth title in the series was published last month.  See this page for the schedule for the remainder of the series.

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In a nice touch, the tabletop display that greets you on entering the bookshop is garnished with a bouquet of flowers.

Filed Under: Blog, Books, Bookshops Tagged With: bookseller, bookshop, Gloucester Road, independent, London, quarterly, readers

Off the Shelf

March 4, 2014 By achuka Leave a Comment

New site launched by Simon&Schuster to help readers find books…

Off the Shelf is a site and newsletter created by passionate editors, authors, and others inside the book business to help you discover—or rediscover—great books. Whether they’re bestsellers you never got a chance to read or classics you remember falling for when you first read them, the books we write about have made an indelible impression on us as readers and have become friends we revisit often. We hope that shining a new light on these wonderful books will help you discover a passion for them too.

Mercy Pilkington on Good E-Reader writes:

A number of companies have tried to combat the growing problem of ebook discovery by building daily email lists and book websites, landing pages that are supposed to draw readers in order to discover the latest in publishing. Companies like Libboo have recently launched a daily feature based on traffic generated called The Midlist, designed specifically to highlight worthy books that are getting some traction, while not necessarily being top of the list bestsellers.

Today, Simon&Schuster announced its own version of a discovery mailer called Off The Shelf, but one thing that makes S&S’s site standout is its publisher-agnostic focus. By highlighting a variety of books instead of just their own catalog of titles, the publisher is taking a rather selfless move in the direction of connecting authors and readers.

via Off the Shelf.

Filed Under: Blog, Books Tagged With: discovery, readers, recommendations, reviews, Simon

Helen Grant: Age inappropriate reading

February 18, 2014 By achuka Leave a Comment

Helen Grant, pictured here as an 18-year-old ‘young adult’, asks who exactly is buying (and reading) YA novels…

From her blog:

A report in Publisher‘s Weekly in 2012 revealed that 55% of YA books are purchased by adults, and that 78% of the time these adults are buying the books for themselves, not for a teen relative. I‘ve never had such accurate statistics on the readers of my own novels, but I do receive at least as many comments, emails and social media messages from adults as I do from teens. The last of these was from the mother of an adult friend of mine (ie over 60) who had borrowed her copy of Silent Saturday and “has not been able to stop reading it.”

So what is going on here? Are we all a bunch of wistful kidults? Are adult books “too hard” for some readers? Are YA books easier and more relaxing to read? (Considering the subject matter of some of them, I‘d say no to that last one, at least as a generalisation.)

via Helen Grant: Age inappropriate reading.

Filed Under: Blog, Books Tagged With: audience, readers, teen, YA, young adult

“This woman noticed me.” Mai Lin Li on the future of libraries.

July 15, 2013 By achuka Leave a Comment

During last month’s Hannah Festival, a short printed text by writer and artist Nick Thurston was distributed. These notes sketched some of the themes and ideas that frame his solo show, ‘Pretty Brutal Library’ at &Model Gallery, 25 July – 31 August 2013.

To coincide with the show, Hannah is publishing for the first time a provocation paper investigating the future of libraries, written by Mai Lin Li — a former librarian (and formar ACHUKA reviewer) — as part of her Clore Leadership Programme fellowship:

this woman noticed me. She noticed what I had read and, if I’d liked it, she knew what else I might like too, and she took a moment to tell me all of this, and offer me a choice, if I wanted it. Not only did she make a connection between the book I had read and me, but also between me and the next book in a long and delightfully unending line of books that I may or may not read.

While reading may be an ostensibly solitary act, reading your way through a public library is emphatically not. It is a social act and civic one too, enacted in a shared space where the needs of the individual are regarded, accepted and met, on the understanding that those rights are available to all and conditional on a number of responsibilities – responsibilities to self-manage, respect and share.

via “This woman noticed me.” Mai Lin Li on the future of libraries. | hannah festival.

You should definitely download and read the full pdf version of The Handmade Library

Filed Under: Blog, Books Tagged With: books, choosing, librarians, libraries, Mai Lin Li, readers, selecting

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