The Albion Beatnik Bookstore website (or how to change a light bulb in a tight space on a ladder)

The web page of the Albion Beatnik Bookstore, based once in Oxford, then Sibiu, always neo-bankrupt, now closed for business: atavistic and very analogue, its musings and misspells on books and stuff.

Monthly Archives: January, 2017

Orwell & Top Cat

GEORGE ORWELL is the twentieth century Shakespeare, for so much of his writing has strayed into common parlance. Orwellian is a control of policy by a Liquorice Allsorts of disagreeable … Continue reading

31st January 2017 · Leave a comment

Kerouac & the Sputnik

Whilst living a fairly dissolute life – a university drop out, a naval honourable discharge, arrested as an accessory to murder – Jack Kerouac wrote constantly throughout the turmoil in … Continue reading

18th January 2017 · Leave a comment

Opening Lines

I recently posted online my two favourite opening lines from novels: Earthly Powers, Anthony Burgess: “It was the afternoon of my eighty-fifth birthday, and I was in bed with my … Continue reading

11th January 2017 · Leave a comment

Fettled Hands: You Can Call Me Hal

Pianists each have a distinct touch and each have fettled hands. My pick of the best is displayed below. Dinu Lipatti could stretch an octave and five, brittle and perfect, fluttered his fingers … Continue reading

6th January 2017 · Leave a comment

Catgut & Chopsticks: Chris Garrick & David Gordon

The Bookstore is christened the Beatnik because of Kerouac and Ginsberg’s association with jazz. The shop has a wholesale stash of jazz literature, a wonderful jazz CD cupboard painted (in fact on both … Continue reading

5th January 2017 · Leave a comment

Let’s Talk of Graves, of Worms, & Epitaphs; Make Dust our Paper…

So here’s a nice little copy sold yesterday of George Herbert’s The Temple & A Priest to the Temple, Everyman edition, the binding slightly shaky but from a time when … Continue reading

4th January 2017 · Leave a comment

Stig of the Dump, Ardizzone, Go-karts & Girlies

So I met someone last night who is known as Stig (he’s got an otherwise posh name). He’s nicknamed after Clive King’s hero, Stig of the Dump, the now classic … Continue reading

2nd January 2017 · Leave a comment

Bernard O’Donoghue’s Connolly’s Bookshop

Barbara Pym’s Excellent Women