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
‘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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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