Despite all our email problems yesterday, a very exciting email managed to battle its way through.  It was from The Bookseller telling us that we’ve been short-listed in The Bookseller Retail Awards in the Walker Books Children’s Independent of the Year category.  We are very surprised, and very pleased and really looking forward to the awards ceremony and dinner at The Natural History Museum in September. 

So far, 2009 has been a brilliant year for us and although sometimes things are a bit chaotic in the office and despite the fact that I’m so snowed under with paperwork at times that I get a bit over-whelmed, I’m really proud of what we’re building here and of all the people who work with us.  Malcolm and I truly have the best staff in the world.

Today however, I need to stop wondering what on earth I’m going to wear to the awards in September (Malcolm’s fine as he’ll just drag his trusty kilt out) and practising my gracious loser face (because we’re thrilled to have got this far and have no expectations of actually winning) and get down to the more practical issues of buying a till for the gallery; sorting out the continuing problem with our email (our hosting company, SupaNames, really aren’t doing themselves any favours by being so utterly hopeless); send out the royalty statements to my lovely authors; wrestle with some forms that need to be sent to The Revenue; invite our shop mailing list to a preview of the exhibition next week; test the burglar alarm at the new shop and call one of my illustrators about an article on The Fidra Gallery that The Scotsman are planning.

Our email seems to be on the fritz so if you’ve emailed any of us in the last few days it might be worth calling us to see if we got it.  It doesn’t seem that anything is getting through on the Fidra Books emails.  Malcolm is going to call our ISP people when he gets in later but I don’t know whether the missing ones are being held in some kind of quarantine so we may never receive them.  Our office number is 0131 447 1917.  With luck we’ll be back to normal soon.

… The Edinburgh Bookshop has a Facebook group* - do go and join!  If it doesn’t sound too needy it would be great to have a few members who aren’t actually related to us.  We’ll be able to keep you updated as to progress and to events we’ve got planned and all manner of stuff. 

In the meantime, look there it is on the left with a big poster in the window telling people what’s going to be happening.  And stressing that it’s a grown-up bookshop rather than an ‘adult bookshop’ which is what some people keep calling it and which has altogether different connotations…

* Obviously, I should point out that The Edinburgh Bookshop will have a truly fabulous website in a few weeks’ time when Malcolm has time to build it.  Just as soon as we stop debating what it should look like and make some decisions.  At the moment we’re still at the stage where I wave my hands around and Malcolm sighs in a long-suffering manner.  But for now, don’t forget the Facebook group.

We are delighted to be able to tell any blog readers who haven’t seen the latest news from the Carnegie and Kate Greenaway Medal awards - probably the most prestigious UK awards - that Edinburgh illustrator, and loyal supporter of The Children’s Bookshop, Catherine Rayner has won this year’s Kate Greenaway Medal for her marvellous book Harris Finds His Feet.  If you follow this link you can see her speech at the awards ceremony yesterday.

We’re huge fans of Catherine’s work and the painting from her latest book, Sylvia and Bird, that we bought at a show before Christmas is one of our most prized possessions.  We’ve also just been send a blad of her forthcoming title, Ernest and it’s equally marvellous and will help to build her reputation as one of the most imaginative illustrators and storytellers around.  Cat’s sending work to our gallery’s summer exhibition where I’m sure it will be very popular with customers, if only I can be firm and remind myself that I can’t keep all of the wonderful work that’s arriving every day!

My father-in-law, ex Vice Principal of the art school where Catherine trained, is not a man to praise work lightly and he summed up Cat’s work perfectly when he said that she had a wonderful way of drawing animals and giving them characters and personalities without a hint of twee-ness. 

I mentioned it briefly yesterday but probably didn’t accord it the razzamatazz it deserves but The Fidra Gallery has its own very fabulous website now - go and look when you have a minute.  The incredibly talented Malcolm built it and frankly I think it puts a lot of very expensively designed sites in the shade - no gimmicks, no music (how annoying is music on websites???), no waiting ages for things to load, just elegant design and intuitive usability.  He’s available for commissions you know, but not until after September as we’re quite busy until then.

But I digress… if you head over to the website you’ll see a list of illustrators who are sending us work for the exhibition which opens to the public on 11th July - click on each name and you can find out which pieces will be on show and more about the artist in question.  The News page is where you’ll find the latest news and you can sign up for our RSS feed in order to receive updates emailed to you.  But best of all, halfway down the home page you can sign up for the gallery mailing list - your name, your email, copy the security code and then the system will send you an email with a link to click on to confirm that you did want to sign up and that some naughty person didn’t do it on your behalf.  How easy is that?

We’re holding a Private View for people on the mailing list at 6.30pm on the 10th July so that our customers can join us for a glass of wine, get a first look at the artistic wonders on our walls and see where the new bookshop will be in September.  I’d join the mailing list to be honest - I mean, there’s a party in it for you!

Well, that’s it finalised.  We’re delighted to announce that The Edinburgh Bookshop Ltd will be opening at 181 Bruntsfield Place on Saturday 5th September.

It’s a hundred yards or so up the road from The Children’s Bookshop and is going to be for grown-ups.  The Children’s Bookshop will stay here and will in fact have a bit more space as the drop currently given over to grown-up books will be available for Gill to squeeze in even more fabulous kids’ books.

We weren’t planning to do anything new this year but to consolidate, take it a bit easier after the stress of the last couple of years and maybe think about new projects next year.  But you know how it is - Malcolm had the idea of The Fidra Gallery and we looked for premises and then we found premises but the previous tenants wanted to assign the lease on a long-term basis rather than just for the summer and then we thought about a second shop because we’ve thought for a while that a grown-up bookshop would do well here and then we thought ‘what the hell?’ and here we are with our second shop.  Ta-Dah!

It’s going to be a busy summer as The Fidra Gallery will be opening in a shade under three weeks and running at 181 until 29th August and then The Edinburgh Bookshop (no website yet, but soon, we promise) will be opening on 5th September.  Just like that.

Now all we have to do is sort out utilities, framing, the private view for the gallery , the opening stock order for the bookshop, a manager for the bookshop, decorating, a till, accounts with publishers… you get the picture.

Anyway, lots more info about gallery, publishing and bookshops coming up in the next couple of weeks but there’s something to think about for now, and it’s nice to be back!

Following on from my ‘Why I Hate Twilight’ post, about 4 people sent me this link overnight.  Seems it isn’t just a few of us who think that the Twlight phenomenon is a combination of ridiculous, creepy and encouraging negative relationship dynamics.  Cripes - that last sentence sounds as though I’m writing a sociology essay so I’ll quit while I’m ahead.  But do go and watch it - it’s how Buffy would deal with stalkerish Edward rather that how wimpy Bella does.  And it made me laugh lots.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is possibly the only book I’ve consistently re-read.  Every couple of years I bring it off the bookshelf and treat myself to Muriel Spark’s world of 1930’s Edinburgh.  As a resident of the city for most of my life, she captured the mood and schizophrenia of Edinburgh perfectly, and almost uses the city as another character.  Humour abounds (”Ah, chrysanthemums. Such serviceable flowers.”) as she seamlessly switches periods from the girls first starting school; to their more senior years; from Miss Jean Brodie’s betrayal; to a time far from her prime, dwelling on the past.  It is undoubtedly a wonderful piece of writing, but the reason I keep coming back is the fact I’m never able to fully understand all of the characters - they seem to always hang agonisingly out of reach.  On one reading, I may think I understand Jean Brodie, the next time that understanding is lost, but I may learn more about Sandy and her act of betrayal.  One day I hope it all comes together: the mystery of the female characters and relationships explained, and I can finally put it to one side and move on.

This is probably the main reason I’ve not read much more of her work - do I really need another book I feel compelled to revist every few years?  However, I recently read A Far Cry From Kensington, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, I loved it.  Mrs Hawkins is a young widow living in furnished rooms in South Kensington, reflecting, some 30 years later, on the shady literary world in which she worked as an editor and her deadly enemy - a man madly ambitious to be a writer, but with absolutely no talent. He manipulates those around him to gain a foothold in the publishing world to advance his nonexistent literary career. Irritated by his persistent sycophancy and smarminess, she publicly denounces him as a pisseur de copie - a urinator of journalistic copy. Anonymous letters, blackmail and suicide ensue; Mrs Hawkins, however, refuses to be a victim. The politics of publishers in 1950s London, in particular, intrigued me and many aspects have thankfully been long forgotten. Unfortunately, as recent experince demonstrates, the Pisseur de copie still blights the literary world.  But it’s a far cry from Fidra.

As many of you may know, Fidra will soon be publishing Ruby Ferguson’s Jill series, which is beloved by pony fanatics, and Vanessa in particular. And because they’re so cherished by so many, we’re determined to get them right.

Which is background information to explain why Vanessa, a lovely lady called Sally and I were on a hillside overlooking Edinburgh one day last week, jumping up and down waving dock leaves, throwing grass and generally making complete and utter idiots of ourselves in order to attract the attention of two horses whose expressions veered between bemusement and mild irritation.

This photoshoot wasn’t the easiest to organise, not just because we had to coordinate people’s diaries but because we had to predict good weather. Anyone who’s been to Edinburgh will probably give a wry chuckle of Bitter Experience here, because it’s often possible to have four seasons in one day here. We ended up cross-referencing the BBC, the met office, and various other weather sites to find a day - at one low point with the rain lashing outside we were even considering the shipping forecast!

In the end though, we had an almost idyllic day, with only a tiny bit of drizzle. There were birds singing; there were rolling hillsides and beautiful ponies:

It was obvious that nearby ponies were actually a bit jealous, going by the amount of ‘casual’ fence peering:

And although we have some photos where the pony is clearly thinking ‘what the?!’, all the insane jumping around was successful, because we have some gorgeous pictures which are worthy of the Jill series. Robbie Smith, our photographer, is a very talented and dedicated man, as is evidenced in him lying down very, very close to a cantering horse, his only protection a grey woollen cableknit cap.

Sally and her daughter Emma, who own Melody and Minnie, two of the horses in the shoot, also went above and beyond - I’m not sure many people would agree to give up a day and let strangers put their horses in poses. Emma even consented to put her hair in plaits, which I don’t think I would have been so amenable to when I was thirteen. We’re considering having a Top Gear style Cool Wall in the office, and Sally and Emma would be in the sub-zero range.

If you’re a Ruby Ferguson fan, the first three books in the series, Jill’s Gymkhana, A Stable for Jill and Jill Has Two Ponies, will be out in August…

I should point out that only one of the photos in this blog post was taken by Robbie - I was taking photos of the shoot - it was all a bit postmodern!

when computers were the size of a room and cost half the national debt, a writer had to use a typewriter.  They had to endure no backspace key, no fancy formatting, no spell check, no cut n paste and went without all the things that make writing so comfortable and attractive in the modern world.  In its place was thought and only forward movement on the page (along with a lot of expletives if anything did go wrong).

One writer however,  by the name of Will Self, stood against the forward march of technology and harked back to this long forgotten time:

Writing on a manual [typewriter] makes you slower in a good way, I think. You don’t revise as much, you just think more, because you know you’re going to have to retype the entire (flipping) thing. Which is a big stop on just slapping anything down and playing with it.

As someone who can endelessly hack the text about once I’ve got it down, it sounds like a nightmare to revert to using a typewriter, but I must concede he does have a point.  If I thought a bit more about what I wanted to say, how I was going to say it and think about the structure and progression then all that time wasted reordering things, deleting the odd word, adding another and generally playing with it might not be needed.  In fact it could possibly be better as the written words might flow onto the page (I can always dream).  So for all those writers who want to slow down and think, you can download this virtual typewriter.  Just let us know how you get on, but preferably without the muttered obscenities.