It’s been another busy week, and I feel like I’ve hardly been in my flat at all – so it’s nice to be here for the weekend, and I’ve got various friends coming around too. The more people who see it, the more it feels like home. And I’ll give a proper tour before too long, I hope!
Hope you’re having a good weekend – and here is the usual weekend miscellany round-up of book, blog post, and link.
1.) The link – is an exciting new initiative called Bluestocking Book Tours. Lauren got in touch to tell me about it, and it sounds fantastic – 2.5 hours of a guided specialist tour of some of London’s bookshops, with different themes for different tours. The link above has details about when and what they are, and if you come on the 18th November one then I’ll be there too! I’ll also report back fully on the tour I attend, of course.
2.) The blog post – I’m over at Shiny New Books writing about one of the best books I’ve read this year. It’s The Diary of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell, and it’s hilarious. Anybody who loves non-fic about books will adore this one – think of it as a slightly more cynical version of 84, Charing Cross Road.
3.) The book – I think David mentioned this on Facebook, though could have misremembered – it’s This Little Art by Kate Briggs, about translation. It’s part of a series of interesting essay collections, beautifully and simply printed by Fitzcarraldo Editions, and one I’ll probably give in and buy at some point when Project 24 is over…
I think the book tour sounds a smashing idea. Look forward to hearing your view on the one you going on.
The book tours sound interesting but sadly so many of the specialist bookshops I knew and used when I first came here have since closed for good. Any bookshop with an engineering or science or transport orientation appears to have vanished now. You will note that such subjects appear not to be on the list of available tours sadly :( I hope you can find out from your tour guide that I am wrong and just out of date.
Thank you for the mention. Hmm, I haven’t searched out or come across many technical bookshops in London. I know Shaun Blythell in his Diary of a Bookseller (mentioned by Simon above) talks about how popular these books can be – whole collections moving in and out of his shop in days. The Maritime section in Stanford and the Architecture Engineering books in RIBA are the closest thing on the tours I’ve developed thus far. I know the Canal Museum has a small collection and if you haven’t been to the Museum it is worth a look around…
Like the sound of the translation essay a lot – I may have to seek this out…