Alexander McCall Smith is one of our favourite local authors; he’s also a very entertaining speaker. We’re therefore very excited to be hosting the launch of The Double Comfort Safari Club, the newest book in the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series, on Wednesday 3^rd March. The event is being held in Christ Church, Bruntsfield (a beautiful church opposite The Children’s Bookshop) at 7.30pm. Tickets are £5 which gives £5 off the book and are selling fast so get yours now to avoid disappointment. To book your tickets drop into The Edinburgh Bookshop. If you’re unable to get into the shop, you can phone and book over the phone and we will post your tickets out to you. The number to call is 0131 229 9207.

Single?  Want to meet someone lovely but are fed up with meeting blokes who just want to tell you about their dull job and brag about their New Town flat and BMW?  Or being set up with girls who want you to be interested in handbags or how they nearly sat next to Brad Pitt on a plane?  Wouldn’t it be nice to meet someone and talk about books?  Then you’d really know whether you had anything in common before you went on that first date and on that date, if conversation dried up a little, you’d know that you could talk about books a bit more, wouldn’t you?  If only someone would organise something that meant you could meet that sort of person…

Well, wish no more single people of Edinburgh because The Edinburgh Bookshop is riding to the rescue with the city’s – and quite possibly Scotland’s – first literary speed dating evening.  Instead of trying to chat in nightclubs or resorting to on-line dating agencies, why not come along to the incredibly stylish The One Below at The Rutland Hotel and see what happens? We’ve got the whole bar to ourselves for the evening so there’s room for lots of people.

You’ll meet lots of people and have 2 or 3 minutes to talk to each of them about your favourite book or books and at the end of the evening you can tick the names of the people you’d like to know better.  The following day Becky and I will get the lists together and people who ticked each other will be emailed with each other’s contact details.

Why not come along?  Tickets are £5 including a drink on arrival.  At worst you get to spend an evening talking about books (never a hardship) and you might even find everlasting love?

Email love@edinburghbookshop.com for more info.

Over the Christmas break we did some planning re events for The Edinburgh Bookshop and since we came back to work last Tuesday we’ve been busily finalising details…

Our next event is actually this Monday evening when Ian Rankin will be joining us for the first in an occasional series called The Books That Made Me.  We’re all familiar with standard author gigs where they chat to the chairperson for a bit, read part of their new book and then take questions from the audience before busily signing and those are great, but for authors who don’t have a hot-off-the-press new book out or who are local and therefore familiar faces at those sort of events we wanted to try something new and Ian kindly agreed to be our guinea pig privileged inaugural guest.  We’ll be talking about the books he loved as a child, what he read growing up in Fife, how studying literature at university widened his reading further and the authors who’ve influenced his own writing.  Obviously we’ll also be talking about his work now that Rebus has been pensioned off and his latest book The Complaints and he’ll be signing after the event. 

Having told you all about that, the event is sold out, especially since I was on BBC Radio Scotland on Monday talking about our upcoming programme but at least you know the format for the future and hopefully for those of you who are now wishing you’d booked tickets, it will encourage you to head over to The Edinburgh Bookshop’s website and join our mailing list so that you’re one of the first to know about events. And if you’re an author reading this who’d like to come and talk to us about their inspirations do drop me an email.

There are some great events for which tickets are still available.  On 4th February Ruth Thomas, author Things to Make and Mend will be joining us to talk about Super Girl, her new collection of short stories.  We all love this book and Ruth is a witty and interesting speaker so it’s well worth coming along – tickets are available from the bookshop but do hurry as it’s being held in the shop itself and so space is limited.  Tickets are £5 with £5 off the cost of the book.

And event for which we have masses of space is the launch of Alexander McCall Smith’s new Lady Detectives book The Double Comfort Safari Club on 3rd March.  This is being held in Christ Church, the beautiful church opposite The Children’s Bookshop and so we have space for hundreds – given the popularity of the books I imagine we’ll fill it too!  Sandy is charming and amusing and his events are always great fun so do come if it’s at all possible.  Again, tickets available from The Edinburgh Bookshop.  Tickets are £5 and this is refundable in the form of a discount if you buy the book.  If you can’t get to the shop you can always call and book over the phone and we’ll post them out to you – 0131 229 9207. 

There a couple of other author events still to be finalised which we’ll be telling you about soon.  And, once we’ve checked out the venue, we have a very special event for Valentine’s Day to tell you about.  You’ll have to wait until next week to hear the details but it you pop along to the Fidra podcasts page and listen to BBC Scotland’s Book Cafe programme would be able to hear me talking to Stuart Kelly of Scotland on Sunday and poet and novelist John Burnside about our plans for the next couple of months and you’ll be forewarned as to what we’re planning…

On Boxing Day this piece about two of Andrew’s favourite books of 2009 appeared in the Evening News.  We particularly like being described as “one of the city’s best [bookshops] for promoting Scottish talent” and the two books that Andrew chose are also on the top ten lists of the rest of us.  And, naturally, they’re both available at The Edinburgh Bookshop…

Vanessa and I looked at each other one day last week and were both completely unable to form a coherent sentence: such is the world of working in retail near Christmas. (Don’t misunderstand me, we’re definitely grateful for the rush of customers, but it doesn’t make for chipperness at the end of the day.)

Therefore, have a peek at the following pretty pictures in lieu of deep and meaningful thought. Because frankly, there’s not much of that left right now!

Firstly, on the publishing side, Vanessa mentioned yesterday that Jill’s Gymkhana is finally here. Well, here it is on the shelf. You are allowed to coo in admiration, if you so wish.

On the bookshop front, we have Peter Pan gracing our Christmas window, because it’s currently on at The Lyceum (and we because also love this new pop-up edition of it).

On a completely non-work topic, remember this post? Well, I take back my indictment of winter a little, because even though I felt like I’d had my legs anaethetised by the time I got to work, Edinburgh was looking quite picturesque this morning with its light dusting of snow.

 

I’ve knitted this scarf (the first thing I’ve done without dropping a single stitch- yay!) for my mum, but I’m now sorely tempted to wear it myself…

As Vanessa and Malcolm are The Best Bosses in the World (TM), today was my last day at work before Christmas. So from me at least, I hope everyone reading has a lovely break, and see you (or interact with you?) in 2010.

Regular readers will remember that we planned to start reissuing the Jill series by Ruby Ferguson this year.  Well, they’ve been delayed (one printer sadly going into administration, pressure of work in other areas of the business and you can imagine how time-consuming setting up the new bookshop has been!) but sneaking in under the wire is the first title – Jill’s Gymkhana – now available from ourselves by visiting the Fidra Books on-line shop and, fairly soon, available from all good bookshops – copies will have arrived at our wholesalers so the rest depends on the speed of their goods-in departments to turn them around.

To be honest, if you want Jill’s Gymkhana in time for Christmas (and why wouldn’t you?), you’d be best to order it from us and we will send it out as fast as humanly possible.  Sadly though, overseas orders won’t be there in time for Christmas but shortly afterwards.

We’re all delighted with how Jill’s Gymkhana is looking with her gorgeous new cover (thanks to Sally, Emma and Melody not to mention the very talented Robbie who risked life and limb to get that close to those galloping hooves) and I hope that she’ll find fans among a whole new generation of readers as well as reminding those of us who loved the books in our childhoods.  Anyone who has yet to discover Jill can read the first chapter here.

You might have been wondering why the blog has been a wee bit quieter than ususal. Well, it’s partly because of the Christmas rush and partly because we’ve set up a new blog, State of Independents. We’re going to keep on posting here, but it’s mainly going to be about what’s going on with us in the bookshops and publishing. State of Independents will encompass our thoughts (or sometimes rants, if we’re being honest) about the booktrade in general.

Vanessa and I have both written a post each already, so pop over and have a read (and a comment!).

I first discovered Aly Monroe’s thriller, The Maze of Cadiz, back in the halcyon days of buying fiction titles for BCA. The rights team at John Murray, her publisher, were so keen to get more support for the first title in the Peter Cotton series of espionage-thrillers that I was lucky enough to read her novel in manuscript form.

That you may not have heard more about Aly says a lot about the stranglehold that one chain of bookstores currently holds over new writing in Britain than any in-depth analysis on the BBC’s business news. We have three branches of Waterstones in Edinburgh and so introducing Aly, a local author, to an Edinburgh audience just as her second novel is published, felt like we were breaking new ground.

The role that we hope to play in Edinburgh’s book-loving community in the future was perfectly encapsulated by an evening where Aly felt encouraged to be reading from her work to an audience who not only understood the historical context of Aly’s writing but who appreciated thrillers more intent on characterisation and narrative than the whizz-bang effects of lesser writers.

Aly’s second novel, Washington Shadow, sees Peter Cotton accompany Keynes’ post-war mission to the United States. Cotton has completed his term of National Service and is now a civil servant. His wartime experiences have changed him, his youthful naivety is beginning to turn to mature cynicism and now he must watch the century’s great economist beg for aid from the new master of the world even as others attempt to derail the democratic partnership. It is a time of new fears: the decline of empire, the rise of communism and the threat of perpetual war. Through solid research and a sure sense of time and place, Aly’s books capture a period of history with a fraught tension not seen since Eric Ambler.

Just a week later, we welcomed back the first author to appear at our shop, Edward Hollis.

Our first event with Ed, back in October, sold out very quickly and as we had more than enough people on the waiting list to sell-out again, we invited Ed back to give another talk. When you consider that Ed’s book, The Secret Lives of Buildings, is a book on architecture, then you may share our pleasant surprise at how popular his book has proven.

The Secret Lives of Buildings was long-listed for The Guardian First Book Award – but really, it should have gone on to be the eventual winner. The prose is so rich and so finally-tuned that it compares to the folk tales of Italo Calvino.

Ed is one of those extraordinarily gifted people who is able to share his passion for architecture in a way that audiences find infectious. Some in the audience found some of Ed’s opinions controvertial but Ed made an impassioned argument that rather than memorialise old buildings, we should celebrate when new or contemporary cultures adapt ancient places to modern uses. Buildings are nothing so much as the people in them and it is the magical heart at the centre of Ed’s book to which readers are responding so eagerly.

As many of you know, Maisy and Winnie came on Saturday, and were much admired by Bruntsfield children (other than a few very little ones who could only really see Maisy’s very large black nose, and had an expression of complete puzzlement mixed with mild horror). We also gave away copious numbers of balloons and goody bags. All in all, lots of books were sold and lots of small children were made very happy, which made it a successful day for all concerned.

As you can see, they looked especially good against Andrew’s stunning Winnie the Witch window (she says, alliteratively!).

At the risk of sounding like Gwyneth Paltrow at the Oscars, I can’t write this post without mentioned the hordes of people who came to help us: by my count we had two reps (plus willing children), one literary agent, one person from Publishing Scotland, Vanessa’s brother and numerous other non-book trade friends. Polly even came down from Aberdeen to lend a hand. At one stage we had a production line of goody-bag-making, balloon-tying and till-ringing.  We really appreciate all their hard work, especially on a Saturday!

Liam from Publishing Scotland, looking Very Serious next to Maisy…

Now we have the conundrum of who to invite to next year’s party. Personally, I would love to see either Spot or Elmer…

Those of you who have been reading the blog for a while may remember our birthday party last year when we had Kipper the dog as a special guest.

Well, this year, we are playing host to Maisy the Mouse and Winnie the Witch! So if you’re in the Edinburgh area tomorrow, be sure to pop in and say hello to us and them. We’ve also just put together some amazing goody bags to give away. All purchases tomorrow will be 10% off, so it’s also a great time to start Christmas shopping…

Our resident shop-window artist has also done a truly amazing Winnie, as you can see above, so we’re all set for a marvellous day. If you can’t come along, you’ll have to wait for one of us to put up some pictures next week!