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: bookselling

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

‘Closed For Business As Usual’

This first pic is a study in the dishonesty of perspective: my fat arse shielding the even fatter arse of Oxford-based writer Dan Holloway, both of us in pursuit of … Continue reading

2nd February 2018 · 4 Comments

Beatnik Curiosities, or Customers Happen

Some of the more noteworthy happenings in the Bookstore of late. Russian guests meet after hours in the Beatnik the night before Prof of Poetry Simon Armitage’s lecture at University Schools to … Continue reading

19th December 2017 · Leave a comment

Filming Bernard O’Donoghue Read ‘Connolly’s Bookshop’

Bernard O’Donoghue’s poetry collection The Seasons of Cullen Church (Faber, 2016) is lyrical and observant, an elegiac lament, beautiful so often, riddled with memories of a childhood spent near Cork. … Continue reading

14th March 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

Things that Annoy Booksellers, part 1

Odd that as the Kindle and the computer are so efficient – I am told we no longer need books or paper – that any bog standard academic these days … Continue reading

7th December 2016 · Leave a comment

Hans Fallada & Despair at Brookfield Farm

HANS FALLADA was published by Melville House only in 2009, Penguin thereafter (translated by Michael Hofmann), so he is a recent invention in the English-speaking world, and a surprising commercial … Continue reading

4th December 2016 · Leave a comment

Judge a Book by its Cover

The earliest surviving dust jacket dates from 1833: a plain buff-coloured paper with the title overprinted in red. In the twentieth century the potential for the dust jacket as a … Continue reading

24th October 2016 · Leave a comment

The Shop Corner of Shame

The latest book in the shop Corner of Shame – that is the resting place for books rejected by customers because considered too expensive – is The Death and Letters … Continue reading

19th October 2016 · 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

Ten Books to Make You See a Big Picture

This selection is made from the Albion Beatnik Press’ book Fifty Shades of Re(a)d (an attempt to curate a vital book collection). These books attempt to take us outside of … Continue reading

22nd August 2016 · Leave a comment

Shrödinger’s Piece of String or How Long Is a Cat?

It makes sense to save money and avoid exploitation from unscrupulous traders who overcharge. Yet discounted prices can sometimes involve moral deviance, zero hour contracts, for instance, and unfair, perhaps even … Continue reading

5th July 2016 · Leave a comment

Four Books to Visit a Shrink with

The book cover designs by Oxford based artist Stella Shakerchi for four of the titles from the forthcoming Oxfordshire Art Weeks exhibition (from 7th May), 50 Shades of Re(a)d, with … Continue reading

5th 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

Spot the Difference Between a Bookshop & Nostalgia (Not Everyone Can!)

http://www.cherwell.org/…/we-should-stop-fetishising-indepe… is one student journalist’s take on Oxford’s small bookshops… Lily is bright (and groovy): bookshops have been fetishised into a commercial vacuum and have become part of the National Trust’s … Continue reading

23rd February 2015 · Leave a comment

Interview with Verushka Byrow on the Australian Book Site editingeverything.com

The link for this interview is: http://editingeverything.com/interviews2/the-albion-beatnik-bookstore-interview/ VERUSHKA: The dictionary tells me that a beatnik is a usually young and artistic person from the 1950s and early 1960s who rejected the … Continue reading

23rd February 2015 · Leave a comment

A Bookseller’s Pompous Manifesto

Publisher John Murray wrote in 1842 that “I am very sorry to say that the publishing of books at this time involves nothing but loss.” The plights of publishing and … Continue reading

23rd February 2015 · Leave a comment

Bernard O’Donoghue’s Connolly’s Bookshop

Barbara Pym’s Excellent Women