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.

Category Archives: oxford

Oxford-thoughts, From Abroad

A part of Oxford has entered the twenty-first century grudgingly. That part is the University, for everything about the University’s observance rests on tradition. Its statutes remain in Latin, Balliol … Continue reading

21st January 2019 · Leave a comment

Bookshops I Have Known

In 1982 I was running books from a nearby market town, Aylesbury, to the provincial, academic avatar that is Oxford, to sell them on for what I regarded to be … Continue reading

6th April 2018 · Leave a comment

The Moving Toyshop & the Awkward Hour Between Evensong & Cocktails

EDMUND CRISPIN’s The Moving Toyshop is one of the classic Oxford novels. Crispin was the pseudonym of Robert Bruce Montgomery, a composer of vocal and choral music which included An Oxford … Continue reading

27th February 2017 · Leave a comment

Three Doorbells in Search of a Door

It took an act of generosity from a Portuguese friend to deliver the rooster, an ornament as fine as a Botticelli angel. But it took my brilliance with a drill to … Continue reading

9th October 2016 · 2 Comments

The Bodleian Library

The Bodleian Library was refurnished by 1613, and the Old Schools Quadrangle extension was already under serious planning – to be measured in cubits rather than feet and inches, based on … Continue reading

11th May 2016 · Leave a comment

Fifty Shades of Re(a)d

It was Oxford based artist Stella Shakerchi who came up with the idea of hanging a collection of book cover design in the Albion Beatnik Bookstore windows, and the shop … Continue reading

1st May 2016 · Leave a comment

This Is A Bookshop

The poster found often in the shop window did for a few golden days go viral and rampant on the internet. Its tale is told here by Dan Holloway in … Continue reading

27th April 2016 · Leave a comment

Novels Set in Oxford

This is a non-alphabetical list of novels set in Oxford, not necessarily recommended as some are a little bit toffee-nosed and derelict, but all are well regarded and all are … Continue reading

19th December 2015 · 2 Comments

A Love Affair with Libraries

Quite a few times on the internet recently I have stumbled across a collection of startling photographs taken of old Cincinnati Public Library, bulldozed in 1955: greyscale, razor sharp images of silhouetted and … Continue reading

20th November 2015 · 1 Comment

Christopher Wren in Oxford

I think that Christopher Wren was a bit of a donkey aesthetically, an opinion likely to raise eyebrows. In the late seventeenth century most architectural roads led to Wren; he hovers … Continue reading

12th November 2015 · Leave a comment

Bernard O’Donoghue’s Connolly’s Bookshop

Barbara Pym’s Excellent Women