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, [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

For approximately the 450th time (well, that may be a slight exaggeration) I tried to read more than 50 pages into The Forsyte Saga, by John Galsworthy. Two hours later I woke up with a page-dented cheek and put it back on the bookshelf with a sigh. I’ve done the same with Gabriel García Márquez [...]

Author Event Number Two was with Michelin-starred chef Tom Kitchin.  It was our first event outside of The Edinburgh Bookshop and so we were nervous about all the things that could have gone wrong:
1. Venue was not to the author’s liking;
2. Author was feeling grumpy;
3. Audience didn’t turn up;
4. Venue was too hot/ cold/ spacious;
5. [...]

Many of you know that Michelin-starred chef Tom Kitchin will be joining us on Monday evening (26th October) to talk about his career, his restaurant, his ethos of local, seasonal food and about his burgeoning TV career, but you may not have seen that in last week’s Sunday Times, restaurant critic A A Gill awarded [...]

Edward Hollis came to talk about his book, The Secret Lives of Buildings on Wednesday night - rather fitting that a debut author should be our first event – and it went exceedingly well. Not for the first time, Vanessa and I were grateful that Andrew is technically minded, because Ed came armed with a projector he’d borrowed and as [...]

Malcolm’s post a few days ago, as well as a BBC article  about the Billy bookcase’s birthday set me off on one of my favourite pastimes: perfect bookshelf dreaming. I’m sure many of you will have seen a picture of this bookshelf/stairs on the left, but I’ve become a tiny bit obsessed and go and look it up [...]