“One major publisher tells me that High Street booksellers are in much worse shape than most of us imagine. We know about the closures, but we don’t know that this publisher has put many shops on “stop”, meaning they will no longer supply them until old invoices are paid. For a publisher desperate for a…
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A welcome return to Dorset. “We spend most of our time eating,” our Beaminster host explained, and with Matt Follas’s The Wild Garlic and the brasserie at The Bridge House Hotel on our doorstep, who can blame them? But there was also fossil-collecting, star-gazing, walking, searching for the ghost of Walter Ralegh and stalking Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall.  

It took the panel of judges three hours wrestle with the ‘impractical difficulty’ of deciding on the winner of what would be the final Orange Prize for Fiction, after the mobile phone giants announced that they were to withdraw their sponsorship for the competition. Joanna Trollope announced from the stage of the Royal Festival Award that…
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Heartfelt thanks to the members of the Cheam Book Club. It is such a great pleasure to be invited into someone’s home to discuss something that you have written and to realise that it had meaning for others. You are all an inspiration. Also, the orchid matches my living room perfectly!     

With Monday 23rd looming, book givers are starting to panic. Rather than being given her first choice, Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle, one young mother has been assigned to the task of giving away 24 copies of a Swedish book about vampires, and how should she go about it when out and about with her young daughter?…
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For a bookshop with a difference, look no further…http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/9124067/London-Book-Barge-A-bookshop-to-float-your-boat.html

Sometimes it is a chore to plug a friend’s book; this time it is the greatest pleasure. Jen Campbell is a poet who also works as a bookseller, whose sense of the ridiculous helps her recognise a good anecdote when she hears one, which in turn has led to a collection called Weird Things People Say in Bookshops (all…
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Right now, someone, somewhere, who thinks on a larger scale than you or I, is dreaming of something magnificent. This is the incredible result…  http://flavorwire.com/270701/enormous-sculptures-of-books-exploding-out-of-buildings

When French back-packer Agnes Varnier discovered that she had mistakenly taken a rucksack belonging to Jonathan Smith instead of her own, she managed to track down its owner…via his local library. When looking for clues about the rucksack’s owner – and let’s face it, who wouldn’t have a good rummage? – she came across two books, including…
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