Foyles opened its new branch in the Westfield Stratford City shopping centre this week, placing the focus on children’s literature and attracting families.
The 5,000 square foot store located on the ground floor of the centre officially opened for its first day of trade yesterday (9th November), welcoming shoppers through the door with a floor-to-ceiling pillar made out of books.
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Bath independent bookseller Mr B’s Emporium of Reading Delights has launched a new website, which it hopes will reach a broader audience.
The Bath-based retailer, who won Bookseller of the Year at The Bookseller Industry Awards 2011, has handpicked all the titles to sell through the site and created lists of recommendations for readers.
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Independent publisher Beautiful Books entered administration earlier today (11th October). The company has ceased to trade and four members of staff have been made redundant.
A spokesperson for London firm Leonard Curtis, the administrating company, said those handling the case would now evaluate Beautiful Books and creditors would receive a report. In a statement, the publisher said: "All the employees at Beautiful Books would like to thank everyone with whom we have worked over the past six years."
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Independent booksellers are lining up special events for Haruki Murakami's eagerly awaited 1Q84 (Harvill Secker) with Foyles planning a midnight opening.
The book, Murakami's first since 2007's After Dark, will be published on 18th October, priced £20. It comprises volumes one and two of the story, with volume three published as a separate hardback on 25th October.
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London's independents have joined forces to publish a map of the city's bookshops.
The London Bookshop Map features 87 indies from across the city including ones selling new, antiquarian, specialist and second hand titles. The map is free and is available in bookshops and galleries. It features a text work from the artist David Batchelor. The map will be updated every six months and rereleased with a new text artwork.
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Simply Books in Bramhall, Cheshire, will host the second Telegraph Book Club Tour Literary Event, to take place this Friday (30th September).
The event will feature author Patrick McCabe interviewed by journalist Geraldine Fox. Jenny Sheils, marketing manager at National Book Tokens, which sponsors the tour, said the bookshop was chosen after "dozens of fantastic comments which championed its qualities as a valued local bookseller.”
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The Independent Alliance has launched a nationwide loyalty card scheme for independent bookshops, with 114 indies signed up so far.
Love Your Indie, which will be run in association with the Guardian and Observer as part of their Books Season, has been put together by Faber marketing director Joanna Ellis and Icon Books sales and marketing director Andrew Furlow, with digital agency Bookswarm's operations director Simon Appleby.
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London independent Goldsboro Books is sponsoring a new prize for debut historical fiction from the Historical Writers Association.
The inaugural prize will be for the best debut published in the UK in 2010 and 2011 and will be presented at the independent bookshop’s History in the Court Festival on 27th September.
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The Big Green Bookshop is marking the scrapping of the iconic decade-long Waterstone's three for two offer by launching its own.
For one day only (10th September) the London independent bookshop based in Wood Green will be offering its customers three books for the price of two.
However, unlike Waterstone's promotion on selected books, the indie is offering customers three for two on any of its stock, including its second hand range, which it will launch tomorrow.
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The last bookshop in Southwold is closing down next week after its owner Booksource sold the lease.
Selling both second-hand and new books, independent Bookthrift was the last bookshop standing in the Suffolk town after the closure of The Orwell Bookshop and Southwold Books, which both shut up shop in the last year.
The manager at Bookthrift, Pamela O’Hara, who used to manage The Orwell Bookshop, said trade had been doing fairly well considering the economic climate and added that sales were only “slightly down” on last year.
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A Dartmouth bookshop opened by the son of Winnie-the-Pooh author A A Milne is closing down after 60 years.
Harbour Bookshop on Fairfax Place was opened in 1951 by Christopher Robin Milne, the inspiration for the character Christopher Robin in his father’s famous Winnie-the-Pooh stories.
Milne owned the bookshop for several years before selling it to Bruce and Nicolette Coward. The shop has been owned by Rowland and Caroline Abram for the last 15 years.
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Granta has commissioned cover images of 93-year-old Diana Athill by celebrity photographer Rankin, better known for portraits of the likes of Kate Moss and Kylie Minogue.
The photographs will grace the jacket of Athill's new hardback Instead of a Book (6th October) plus paperback reissues of Stet, Yesterday Morning and Instead of a Letter.
Granta's artistic director Michael Salu said he had decided it would be interested to bring together "two rather distinguished individuals from different generations" for the images.
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Foyles continues its free book giveaway today (25th July), offering five titles free to children and teen readers.
The five Foyles London stores have been giving away the titles free over this weekend and today, the first weekend of the school summer holidays, with 3,000 books in total.
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Piccadilly Press has signed two separate book deals, one of which is a title tying into next year's Olympic Games.
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Faber has a new typographic look and some new July titles for its print-on-demand and e-book imprint Faber Finds.
Two "seminal" music books of the 1980s, Dave Rimmer's Like Punk Never Happened and Fred Vermorel's Starlust, will launch this week, alongside the late poet Ian Hamilton's appreciation of Paul Gascoigne, Gazza Agonistes. Sylvia Townsend Warner's Strangers in a Bag and Trevor Wilson's The Downfall of the Liberal Party 1914-1935 are also among the newly revived titles.
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Quercus has become the latest publisher to join the iBookstore, making the likes of Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy available for iPad and iPhone.
The publisher does not yet seem to have implemented full agency pricing. On Amazon, it does not specify that Quercus is setting the prices of its e-books, unlike its fellow agency publishers. Fifteen Quercus titles are available on the iBookstore from today.
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The London Magazine has launched a competition for readers to nominate their favourite bookshop, highlighting indies including Daunts.
As part of the publication's The Great Little Shop Awards, this month the magazine is asking readers to nominate their favourite bookshop. Entrants, who can vote online, will be in with the chance to win a set of 50 classic hardbacks from Everyman's Library, selected by m.d. David Campbell.
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A Belfast academic bookshop has decided to shut its doors after 53 years trading, blaming competition from the internet for declining sales over the last five years.
The Bookshop at Queen’s on University Road in Belfast, Northern Ireland, serves students at the Queen’s University Belfast and has set a provisional date of 31st August to close.
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More retailers than last year have signed up to take part in Independent Booksellers Week.
Today (15th June) the Booksellers Association, which is co-ordinating the event, confirmed 262 indies across the UK had agreed to hold events starting from this Saturday until 25th June to help publicise their businesses and form closer links with authors and publishers.
Last year, 251 took part.
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An "iconic" London travel bookshop is being put up for sale after 32 years on the high street.
The Travel Bookshop, based in London’s Notting Hill area, has been run by its present owner, based in France, for the last 25 years. The shop's manager Saara Marchadour said staff were considering a management buy-out.
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Bloomsbury and Faber are to jointly develop a digital content platform providing online access to drama texts.
Drama Online will launch in October 2012, and will feature the drama lists from Methuen Drama, Arden Shakespeare and Faber and Faber, including play texts and critical works. It will be sold via subscription and perpetual access to academic institutions.
Users will be able to search through full texts, have access to textual notes, view parallel texts on screen, and the collection will be continually updated as new titles are released.
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Edmund de Waal, Maggie O’Farrell and Tony Parsons are among the authors
lined up to take part in Independent Booksellers Week. The week of events, in association with the Booksellers Association, will take place between 18-25th June and encourages independent retailers to publicise their businesses and form closer links with authors and publishers.
Beautiful Books has launched its own summer reading campaign, providing POS material and an extra 5% off the selected titles ordered by independent bookshops.
The four titles being promoted through the Go Against the Grain campaign, all from debut authors, are Flick by Abigail Tarttelin; A Clockwork Apple by Belinda Webb; We Did Porn by Zak Smith; and Dog Binary by Alex Macdonald. The campaign will run from mid-June through to the end of August.
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By: Elvin Lim,
on 7/26/2010
Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. See Lim’s previous OUPblogs here.
We have 99 Days to go before Election Day. How different things look today compared to Obama’s first 100 days. In the last year and a half, the national mood has turned from hope to uncertainty. The sluggish job market is the economic representation of this psychological state. Business are not expanding or hiring because they do not know what the future holds for them.
The White House, in acknowledging that it expects unemployment to remain at or around 9 percent, has conceded that voters will have to deal with this state of uncertainty even as they will be invited this Fall to make up their minds about whether their members of Congress deserve another term or if it is time for another reset. A certain act given an uncertain future. That’s the crux of the political game this year.
Come November, voters will be asking: do we stay the course and give the incumbents a little more time to bring back the test results, or do we throw the bums out and issue a new test? Republicans are chanting behind one ear saying, “no results means bad results” and Democrats are chanting in the other, saying, “wait for it, the good times are coming.” With no good news or an objective litmus test in sight, the election outcomes will turn largely on the perception of despair versus hope.
The emerging Republican narrative for Election 2010 is that all this uncertainty in the market was generated by big brother. A massive health-care bill which has made it difficult for business to predict their labor costs for the years to come; a financial deregulation bill has given new powers to government but no indication as to how such powers will be deployed; and now, talk of legislation that would allow the Bush tax cuts to expire in 2010 is only going to spook business out even more. The Republican headline is: despair; and it is time to move on.
Unless they can point to some specific pork they have brought back to their constituents, Democrats will have to deal with this national mood of uncertainty that can easily be turned into despair. The question of whether or not Democrats will lose one or both (because zero is nearly out of the question) houses of Congress will turn on how successfully, once again, they would be able to massage the reality of uncertainty away from the fairly contiguous sentiment of despair into the more unrelated sentiment of hope.
Now that was a lot easier done in 2008. When patience had run dry with Iraq and George Bush, even Independents found it easy to be optimistic about an alternative path. Anything but the status quo was cause for hope in 2008. Not so in 2010, where there is neither clear light at the end of the economic tunnel nor a wreck in sight. It would take a much bigger leap of faith this year for the same people who voted Obama into office to continue to hope that his friends in Congress will deliver on his promises. Indeed, at this point, Republicans and most Independents are probably done with hoping. They’ve heard the boy cry “wolf” too many times.
The only people who will see hope when there is only uncertainty are the Democratic party faithful. If Democrats want to avert an electoral catastrophe, their best bet is to turn out the party faithful who will
By: Lauren,
on 7/13/2010
Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. See Lim’s previous OUPblogs here.
Gallup reported last week that President Obama’s job approval among Independent voters dipped to 38 percent, the lowest support he has ever received from this group of voters.
It would be too easy for Democrats to blame these numbers on the Tea Party movement. Some Independents are Tea Partiers – and those the President has forever lost – but not all Independents are Tea Partiers.
To understand why Obama has lost so many other Independents, we need to understand that Independents are a curious bunch. They don’t believe in partisan loyalty, yet they are notoriously fickle. They may be fairer than Fox and more balanced than MSNBC, and yet because they are beholden neither to personalities nor parties, but to issues, their love for a politician can be vanquished as quickly as s/he fails to perform.
Politicians love to chase Independents, but they best remember that when push comes to shove, Independents cut to the chase. Independents have determined that on too many of Obama’s campaign promises – the closing of Guantanamo Bay, the public (health-care) option, comprehensive energy and immigration reform, ending Don’t Ask Don’t Tell – the President is either foot-dragging or has simply failed to deliver. Part of this, to be sure, is systemic. Most presidents suffer from lower approval ratings in their second year in office because they become victims of the (required) big talk in the year before which had gotten them elected in the first place. But Obama must also take especial responsibility for so unrestrainedly tantalizing his base during the 2008 campaign and then so abruptly disenchanting them when the realities of governance stepped in. When even the Liberal faith in Obama falters, Independents can hardly be expected to hold the fort.
In recent days, the president’s firing of General McChrystal and his handling of the Gulf oil-spill has only confirmed the Independent voter’s growing conviction that Obama is not displaying the perspicacity of a president in charge. There is a sense of chaos, that “something is rotten in the state of Denmark,” or, as Jimmy Carter fatefully put in the potentially analogous summer of 1979, that the nation is suffering “a crisis of confidence.”
The White House is in full-scale damage-control, dispatching both the President and the Vice President on the campaign road, and sending David Axelrod on the Sunday talk-shows to talk their way out of this one. This is completely counter-productive.
Independents voted for Obama because he was not a Washington insider, believing that because he was not obligated or loyal to Democratic apparatchiks as the Clinton machine presumably was, he would be able get things done. More talk is only going to
