Let’s go to the Hay Festival. Three days of books and people, just over the border into Wales. Well, I’d not been to the Festival before now, for all its fame, and it’s been too long since I visited the book town that gave the world book towns. Staying just outside Hereford. A so-so townRead More
Tag: Bookshops
A day in London
A grey but mild day. The rain has gone. There are a few things to seek out in London this Sunday, so I shall set out for a walk around the city. Train journey, reading Christoph Ransmayr’s novel The Dog King. Ransmayr is my great literary discovery of these past few months, but the novelRead More
What can we chant now to lift the dark?
Back in 1981 one of my favourite haunts was the Albion Bookshop in Mercery Lane, Canterbury. Squeezed into its medieval plot over two floors, tightly-packed books climbed up the shelves to ceiling height, while central islands created alleyways through which I could venture through all – so it seemed – that the world of lettersRead More
19 delightful things about second-hand books
Pristine books are rare in second-hand bookshops. Instead the books you find there each bears the marks of their past lives. Online second-hand stores grade their wares with descriptions such as ‘nearly new’, ‘good as new’, ‘used’ and ‘fair’, but though a fresh book is special, so is one that shows its age. It showsRead More
19 annoying things about second-hand books
I have spent an inordinate amount of my time on this planet in second-hand bookshops. I discovered them as a home-from-home when a teenager, and travel about this land with a map in my head of where the nearest such shop can be found. Quite apart from the endless need to keep up the supplyRead More