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£25.00
After arriving in London just before the Second World War as a penniless and friendless Austrian-Jewish refugee, George Weidenfeld went on to transform not only the world of publishing but the culture of ideas. The books that he published include momentous titles such as ‘Lolita’, ‘Double Helix’, ‘The Group’ and ‘The Hedgehog and the Fox’, with authors he championed ranging from Joan Didion, Mary McCarthy, Golda Meir and Edna O’Brien to Henry Miller, Harold Wilson, Saul Bellow and Henry Kissinger. In this biography, Thomas Harding provides a full, unvarnished and at times difficult history of this complex and fascinating character.
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£14.99
Some years ago, Oliver Darkshire stepped into the hushed interior of Henry Sotheran Ltd on Sackville Street (est. 1761) to interview for their bookselling apprenticeship, a decision which has bedevilled him ever since. He’d intended to stay for a year before launching into some less dusty, better remunerated career. Unfortunately for him, the alluring smell of old books and the temptation of a management-approved afternoon nap proved irresistible. Soon he was balancing teetering stacks of first editions, fending off nonagenarian widows with a ten-foot pole and trying not to upset the store’s resident ghost. For while Sotheran’s might be a treasure trove of literary delights, it sings a siren song to eccentrics. This book is the rather colourful story of life in one of the world’s oldest bookshops and a love letter to the benign, unruly world of antiquarian bookselling.
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£10.99
In 2002, with her sister, Hind, and their friend, Nihal, Nadia Wassef founded Diwan, a fiercely independent bookstore. They were three young women with no business degrees, no formal training, and nothing to lose. At the time, nothing like Diwan existed in Egypt. Culture was languishing under government mismanagement, and books were considered a luxury, not a necessity. Ten years later, Diwan had become a rousing success, with ten locations, 150 employees, and a fervent fan base. Frank, fresh, and very funny, Nadia Wassef’s memoir tells the story of this journey.
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£16.99
The Bookshop in Wigtown is a bookworm’s idyll – with thousands of books across nearly a mile of shelves, a real log fire, and Captain, the bookshop cat. You’d think after 20 years, owner Shaun Bythell would be used to the customers by now. Don’t get him wrong – there are some good ones among the antiquarian porn-hunters, die-hard Arthurians, people who confuse bookshops for libraries and the toddlers just looking for a nice cosy corner in which to wee. He’s sure there are. There must be some good ones, right? Filled with the pernickety warmth and humour that has touched readers around the world, stuffed with literary treasures, hidden gems and incunabula, ‘Remainders of the Day’ is Shaun Bythell’s latest entry in his bestselling diary series.
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£20.00
Most of what we say about books is really about their contents: the rosy nostalgic glow for childhood reading, the lifetime companionship of a much-loved novel. But books are things as well as words, objects in our lives as well as worlds in our heads. And just as we crack their spines, loosen their leaves and write in their margins, so they disrupt and disorder us in turn. All books are, as Stephen King put it, ‘a uniquely portable magic’. In this thrilling history, Emma Smith shows us why.
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£9.99
Diana Athill’s letters to the American poet Edward Field reveal a sharply intelligent woman with a brilliant sense of humour, a keen eye for the absurd, a fierce loyalty and a passionate zest for life. The letters cover 30 years of Diana’s life.
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£9.99
In this classic of modern memoir, Diana Athill dissects the terrible consequences of loss and her struggle to rebuild a personality destroyed by sadness.
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£9.99
This is the curious story of our long love affair with books. Whether comfort reads or cult novels, we carry them with us, inhale the smell of their pages, scrawl in their margins, and protect them from book thieves and bathwater. Despite the many enemies of reading – from poverty to prejudice, from the Spanish Inquisition to Orwellian regimes – its power has endured across centuries. This is partly thanks to people like Martin Latham, the longest-serving Waterstones manager (‘It’s not a career, it’s a philosophic path’). In ‘The Bookseller’s Tale’, Martin uncovers the history of our collective book-obsession, and introduces us to the Canterbury bookshop that has been his working home for three decades, complete at various points with two rocking horses, a hammock for staff naps, and an excavated Roman bath-house floor.
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£9.99
From the oldest bookshop in the world, to the smallest you could imagine, ‘The Bookshop Book’ examines the history of books, talks to authors about their favourite places, and looks at over 200 weirdly wonderful bookshops across six continents (sadly, we’ve yet to build a bookshop down in the South Pole).
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£25.00
Born in Germany to aristocratic parents, Sybille Bedford’s (1911-2006) life contained all the grand feeling and seismic event of the 20th century: war and peace, love and trauma, friendship and death, as well as the need to write and rescue something from this wreckage. Openly gay, Bedford once said ‘I wish I’d written more books and spent less time being in love. It’s very difficult doing both at the same time.’ In her forties she published her breakthrough novel, ‘A Legacy,’ continuing to publish until her early nineties, writing some of the outstanding and most original novels, memoirs and travel books of the century.
