The Edinburgh Bookshop will be opening on Saturday 5th September with a glittering launch (aren’t all launches ‘glittering’?  And we do love an excuse for a party) on the 3rd.  Consequently, we need a manager for the new shop and although we’ll probably be advertising in the usual places I thought I’d flag it up [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

… 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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

We were happy to read this announcement that author and illustrator Anthony Browne has been selected as the Children’s Laureate for 2009 – 2011, taking over from Michael Rosen. The position of Children’s Laureate was launched 10 years ago after a conversation between then Poet Laureate, Ted Hughes and author, Michael Morpurgo and was [...]

I love the book trade.  I love being a bookseller; I love publishing the books we rescue from obscurity; I love having new ideas – an exhibition, a second bookshop – and I hate to see the trade being driven in what I feel passionately is the wrong direction.
This afternoon I discovered that I’m completely wrong in my [...]

Kathleen Peyton is one of my favourite authors and has been ever since I saw the TV series of Flambards in the late 1970s.  I was allowed to stay up late to watch it because it had horses in it and I was the classic pony-mad child.  I devoured the books and decided, aged 9, [...]