Happy Saturday everyone. Today I have another post in my occasional series of shops that do a very specialised selection of books as part of their offer: namely the Royal Shakespeare Company’s gift shop at their theatre in Stratford Upon Avon. As you know I was there a couple of weeks back to see Twelfth Night – which ended its run last weekend, so there may have been a little tweakage by now, but I suspect in the main the book selection is fairly consistent – although clearly other bits of the shop will change with the shows.
Lets start with the lovely collection of books about Shakespeare, about acting in Shakespeare or about theatre in the era of Shakespeare. There are a few exceptions but that’s basically the theme of this whole bookcase – among them there’s Judi Dench’s book about her experience being in lots and lots of Shakespeare which is pretty well known and Simon Russell Beale’s book about his experiences – which is less well known. There’s the Bill Bryson books, plus Harriet Walter’s new-this-autumn book about what the women of Shakespeare’s plays might have said.
Next up we have this case of novels that are Shakespeare related in some way and the start of a very large selection of play texts and books about teaching Shakespeare. If you’re a student whose got to study one of the plays or you’ve got to teach it, this would be a great place to have a look at the options.
Because there are so many. So very many. And of course there are also play texts for other shows that the RSC has put one – the Christmas show in the Swan theatre this year was The Red Shoes, and you can also so that they’ve got Marlowe’s Edward II there which is currently in rehearsal ahead of a run starting in late February.
And then there’s books about acting, and a bit of a general miscellany of books that don’t really fit anywhere else but are sort of related to the Shakespeare and acting. Basically if you’re interested in Shakespeare and/or acting, this is probably the best selection you’re going to get outside a really giant specialist bookshop near somewhere with lots of students (like Blackwells or Heffers)
And finally they’ve got loads of other stuff too, but I really did love the baby clothes – they may be too young to go to the theatre themselves yet, but there’s no reason you can’t start them on there way with a babygro with an appropriate quote!
I’ve been in Foyles this week – and Gower Streey again and only two weeks on and and a few new things have appeared…
Lisa Marie Presley’s memoir is clinging on in the display but Al Pacino, Malcolm Gladwell and others have taken the rest of the slots.
The biggest change though is that they’ve moved the crime hardbacks, BLCCs and mass market cozy crimes and now we have three cases of horror…
On to Foyles and we’ve got the big name fiction including Nick Harkaway’s Smiley novel and the Ali Smith which I also spotted in Waterstones a couple of days early too.
And all the new crime and thrillers – including the Leonora Natrass I mentioned the other week.
And then the celebrity memoirs. I think we’ve pretty much got them all now, I can only think of one on my list that hasn’t arrived yet, but it’s a bit more niche.
I’ve included this one because I liked the look of the book about women in advertising.
And I know the question you’re all asking. Yes I did buy something. But actually it was in Foyles, as Gower Street didn’t have any of my target books. So that £30 voucher is still in my purse and I’m going back to Piccadilly next week for the big cozy crime section i resisted so valiantly last week…
I think Thursday this week was the biggest book release day of the year, but sadly I haven’t made it into a bookshop in the last two days – but instead I was in Waterstones Piccadilly on Monday and had a good wander.
There is one of those 24th October releases on this photo though – some kind person had put The Most Wonderful Crime of the Year out on the shelves a couple of days early, so of course I snapped that up. Apart from that the romance display was still fairly Halloween orientated – with Casket Case, Haunt Your Heart Out, The Wedding Witch, My Vampire Plus-One and Morbidly Yours from this season’s crop of spooky releases.
I was really pleased to see Kingmaker on a table – and I’m hoping the fact that there’s only five copies means there were more and they’ve sold a bunch. I also keep coming across mentions of Pamela Harriman at the moment, but I’ve got no idea whether it’s because the book has got people talking or it’s that thing you get where you notice things you would have missed because you’ve recently encountered some form of media about them!
And finally, on the new and reviewed history shelf has three of the history hardbacks from this autumn’s releases that I’m interested in – namely the new Helen Castor and Dan Jones, who are two historians whose work I find really interesting and readable even if their areas of expertise are different to the periods that I am usually the most interested in, and then The Scapegoatagain, which I mentioned last week.
And that’s your lot. I will endeavour to make it into a bookshop this week to see what else I can spot from the autumn new releases. After all I’m soon going to have to come up with a list of books I’d like for Christmas. Oh and I found a Waterstones voucher in my purse today from my Christmas gifts last year, that I only have six weeks left to spend…
As you know from the special Books Incoming after my trip, I went a little bit book buying mad on the trip to Malaysia – and so here we are with the wrap up (there’s a pun there because they were all wrapped in plastic) of my trip to the bookshop in Kuala Lumpur.
So our hotel was right near one of the big mall complexes – and like in Manila, where there was one mall there tended to be more. So I went off on a nice wander around one early evening to see what I could find, in the hope that one of the things I would find would be a book store – and there was, hidden at the top of the third (or maybe fourth) mall I went in, was Book Xcess.
And as you can see, it was lovely and big – there was about the same behind me as in front as I took this picture, and it had a really interesting mix of English language books -mainly American editions, but also a few British ones – you can see the Jenny Colgan Rules from the series I mentioned the other week which is a UK version.
There was a big mystery section as you can see – but although I combed it carefully, there was a sad lack of American Cozy Crime novels, which was a shame because I was really hoping this might be the solution to filling in some gaps in the series that I read. But it was mostly the more hardboiled end of the spectrum, which a healthy dose of British authors along side the US ones.
It was a big cramped around this romance shelves, so there’s a bit of duplication as I tried to get all the stuff in here. And you can see the mix of stuff – British editions of saga-y type novels like the Anna Jacobs; Nick Hornby who isn’t usually romance but I think this one is actually a love story; then a load of contemporary romances Kate Clayborn, more Jenny Colgan and then books I haven’t seen before like Hope Nicely’s Lessons for Life and The Hook Up Dilemma which are both a few years old but I don’t remember coming across anywhere previously.
And more of the same on this one – but also can I just say it also shows how many different sizes the books where. Everything is pretty much the same size in the romance category in the UK – usually when I’ve got something bigger or smaller it’s been because it’s a US import – so you can see what I mean about how many different places they’re drawing their English-language editions from. If you look back at that Books Incoming every book I bought back from Malaysia is a different size/format. Every. Single. One.
I was interested by the tag “Classics and Literature for this shelf” because it’s such a random mix and with so little of what would be considered the classics in a UK store – ie the Dead White Man canon, plus Jane Austen. It’s actually mostly relatively recent prize winners with a fair bit of P G Wodehouse.
General Fiction was the section I found trickiest on the purchase front -t here was lots of stuff here that was really tempting based on the blurb, but the cellophane that everything was wrapped in meant that I couldn’t have a sample to see what they were like. I’m still regretting not buying Agatha of Little Neon: it sounded intriguing but also felt fairly literary prize candidate which isn’t really my vibe as you know but I had limited space in the suitcase – except it’s much more expensive in the UK so maybe I should just have done it, even if it could have been a book that sat on the shelf for years.
And the same applies really to Madonna of the Mountains and Super Host – which all turned out to be a couple of years older than I thought they would be (because I hadn’t heard of them or come across them at all) but could have gone either way on the enjoyment front. And of course when I was making all my choices I was doing it pretty blind – because I was in the back of a mall without access to the internet because there was No Signal so I couldn’t check Goodreads etc. So it was a bit of a lottery.
And I had made my initial choices – of three – when I got to the till and the lovely shop assistant pointed out the offer so back I went again – and as you know my final choice was one of the Blind Dates with a Book, which turned out to be a Hemmingway, which only increased my FOMO on the others books I had left behind. But it was free, so it doesn’t matter right?
And they had two tables and the wall display you can see behind the signs of blind date with a books – so they were very tempting and it remains such a clever idea, I think every time I see it, but the problem with it (for me at least) as we see with the fact mine turned out to be a Hemingway is that when you read as many books as I do, the chances of getting something you’ve already read (even if in the case of the Hemingway it’s a decade or more ago) really increases.
Anyway, I had a ball in the bookshop, probably was in there for nearly an hour all in, and I was very, very glad that my suitcase was the sort that has a zip that expands it for a bit more capacity on the way home!
Last week I wrote about Shakespeare and Company, this week we’ve got the other bookshop I visited on that Paris trip – Eyrolles, which is just around the corner (in Paris terms) and also has a stationery section. My sort of shop. Sadly I forgot to take a photo of the front, so apologies for that.
The first time I went into a French bookshop, I think one of the biggest differences in noticed compared to a British one was the white spines. And then I noticed the size difference. And how many of them were published by Folio. It was only when I got my first French book back to the shelf that I noticed that they write the opposite way on the spine to British books. And it’s been… well a while since that first visit, and French publishing has changed reassuringly little. There are a few differences though
And it’s not just the nonfiction shelves, a lot of fiction is the same. Except for crime fiction. A lot of them get black spines. And I spent a lot of time in French bookshops during the year that I lived there, and I’ve still not really worked out what the rule is for what gets what on that front. And my French translations of Agatha Christie have yellow covers and spines.
The bit where I noticed a change was in the romance and Romantasy where there were they now seem to be using some of the same covers as other countries rather than going for something completely different: I mean look at the cover on the French translation of Casting Off that I bought – I think we’re on the fourth generation of covers for the Cazalet series in the UK and that is nothing like any of them.
I guess it’s too early to tell if this is the BookTok influence – meaning that people all over the world want their covers to match the ones they’ve seen the US book influencers waving, no matter which language it’s in, but considering how different I know the covers used to be (which I don’t with some of the other countries where I’ve seen the same trend) it’s where I’ve wondered about it the most.
But somethings don’t change – here you see that the spines might not be white, but they’re not all the wrap around cover-spine thing that we get so much in the UK. As I said, I bought a copy of Casting Off in French, some very nice stationery (I love Seyes ruled paper, and have produced some of my best handwriting on it over the years) and felt like proper Parisians, then we went off down the road to Shakespeare and Company to be touristy!
This week’s Recommendsday was inspired by the trip to Paris, so it’s only fair that I write about a Parisian bookshop – and this is probably Paris’s most famous bookshop of all.
It should first be noted that this is the second bookshop called Shakespeare and Company that Paris has had – the first was set up by Sylvia Beach just after the First World War and was where Hemingway and all the Lost Generation crowd hung around in the 1920s and 1930s. That Shakespeare and company was forced to shut down by the Nazis in 1941 and never reopened.
This Shakespeare and Company opened as La Mistral in 1951 and was renamed in 1964 on the 400th anniversary of Shakepeare’s birth in honour of Sylvia Beach and her store. And it is now iconic in its own right. It sells new, second-hand and antiquarian books and the crowds to get in start early. We came past about an hour before opening time on the day we visited and there were already a couple of people waiting. We went and had breakfast, stopped at another bookstore (about which more next week!) and came back and the queue had grown somewhat…
This is one of my photos from the queue – you can see some of the queue but also the wonderful (working) water fountain. Luckily it was quite a fast moving queue that morning – we were probably only waiting about ten or fifteen minutes to get in, which was less than I was expecting so I was pretty happy on that front.
You’re not allowed to take photos inside, so this is all I can offer – but you can see the sort of higgledy piggledy ambiance that’s going on, which is just the sort of bookshop that I love. There’s no rush to get you in and out and there are plenty of spots to sit if you want to – but we were a bit tight for time, so we had a really lovely wander around – I picked up that second hand Elizabeth Taylor you saw in Books Incoming and my sister got a cute childrens book – mine got the famous stamp, hers got the sticker, and we were very happy. It’s literally just across the river from Notre Dame, so if you’re heading there to see how the rebuild is going, it’s really easy to find.
Did I go and see Kiss Me, Kate for a third time this week? You bet I did. And did I take the opportunity to have a good old nosy in their shop. Why yes. I even bought something (a t-shirt not a book, I was fresh from a three book trip to Waterstones Gower Street), but they have books and it’s an interesting selection
The fiction selection has some of the usual suspects – Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow and the Dolly Alderton for example, but also some stuff I haven’t seen like Big Swiss and some of the books in translation.
Then there’s a lovely section of London-set books of all sorts, from novels to walking tours to non-fiction.
There’s also a music section – on the first picture you can see there’s another shop on the top level – and that is mostly records, but the downstairs shop also has records, including The Slits album – which reminded me again how good Viv Albertine’s memoir is.
There’s also lots of art and trinkets and some really nice prints of the Barbican or that fit with the brutalist style, but I’m back on the books – this last table has some more of the more regularly spotted literary fiction. All in all a good selection if you’re looking to pick up something in a rush!
As well as Book Conference, my trip to Bristol a few weeks back included a day out in Bath, where I finally got a chance to go to Persephone’s Bookshop, which moved here from London a few yeas back and was basically everything I was hoping it would be.
As you may remember I got a Persephone subscription for Christmas a few years back, which yealded a fair few BotW picks, and I now have a fairly substantial collection of their books, but as with a lot of forgotten-type books, it can sometimes be hard to figure out which ones are going to be your thing from the blurbs, so it was a real joy to have so many of them in such close proximity to each other so you could have a read and sample to work it out.
And they’ve got a couple of comfy chairs for you to sit in to work it out and it all just looks so lovely and welcoming and the displays look so good. They have a multibuy going as well so if you buy in multiples of three you can save a little money. They also have a nice selection of Persephone related merch and items that you might like if you like the books and their design ethos.
And then there is this shelf of the fifty books that they wish that they had published, which includes a fair few that are on my shelves – like The Light Years from the Cazalet series, Elizabeth Taylor’s Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont, Elizabeth Jenkins’s The Tortoise and the Hare, Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love and Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca.
I bought two books for me (which you’ve already seen), a third that was a gift and a little fabric pouch to put your book in to keep it nice in your bag – which is an improvement on the padded envelope that I had been previously using. All in all a great stop on a lovely day out.
Have a great long weekend if you have a bank holiday on Monday.
One of the reasons I love wandering over Daunt Books in Marylebone is because the building is pretty and I like to see what they’re highlighting in their windows – because it’s usually totally different to the other book shops in central London. So imagine my delight this week when they actually changed one of the window displays while I was browsing in the shop!
This was the one they swapped out – you can actually se there are already a couple of empty blocks in the picture – which is for a shiny new edition of a 1950s novel that I had never heard of, but that sounds really interesting. Green Water, Green Sky is about a divorcee and her daughter who lead an itinerant existence in the sort of European spots that rich people liked to hang out in, and what happens when the daughter tries to break free of her mother.
And this is what it was replaced with – The Damascus Events – which is about the 1860 massacre in Damascus, which I’m going to admit that I’d also never heard of, but which was significant in the change from the old Ottoman order towards the modern Middle East.
On the other side we have Family and Borghesia – which is two novellas about domestic life, isolation and the passing of time, which I’m sure are excellent but really don’t sound like a me thing!
The little window was Back to the Local which is a new edition of a book from 1949 about the pubs of London, which seems just perfect for the location!
Then the multi-book window just has all sorts of things – including several from my list of things I’d like to buy when the pile gets to a sensible state – like Once Upon a Time World about the French Riviera, Erotic Vagrancy, the latest in the stream of books about Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton and the sequel to Days at the Morisaki Bookshop, and Abroad in Japan.
The crime tower and table has quite a lot of stuff that I’ve read 0 but also enough stuff that I’ve still got on the pile to make me feel guilty enough not to buy any books! So along with the stuff I’ve read like the Richard Osman and Rev Richard Coles (who Him Indoors had not realised were not all Richard Osman), Eight Detectives and The Cracked Mirror which I’m reading at the moment, there’s also The Strangers Companion, Helle and Death and The Mystery Guest which are all sitting on the Kindle…
This side of the crime display was much less guilt inducing – just the Tom HindleMurder On Lake Garda that’s sitting on the pile, and then the third Cesare Aldo and the Grave Expectations sequel that I want to read, but that I can resist until they come out in paperback!
And finally, a new hardback fiction display – featuring Welcome to Glorious Tuga which I’ve read, and The Divorcées which is on the actual pile because I haven’t and Background for Love and Anita De Monte Laughs Last which sounds like I might really like them, if I can just get the pile under control some time…
Two different Waterstones in todays post – because I can to be honest, just be glad I didn’t include Birmingham airport W H Smith – but there wasn’t anything different to these two this time – I was actually disappointed with the options I had for the holiday really.
Anyway least start with Waterstones Piccadilly. This was the week before the holiday, on the first bumper release day in June. To be honest I think the only reason I took the photo of this fiction shelf is because Mona of the Manor made the cut!
And then this is the upstairs window display in the fiction section of Waterstones Gower Street this week – it’s got some of the same stuff as that first photo from Piccadilly, but it’s also got The Ministry of Time, which I have on the pile and got nominated for the Waterstones Debut Fiction prize this week, as did Glorious Exploits on the far right.
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 