A Buzz in Bloomsbury

It was meant to be a Grand Day Out – a day of absolute indulgence, wandering around some of my old haunts from the days when I worked in WC1 and then on to do some credit card damage in Liberty’s.

Great Russell Street is in the heart of Bloomsbury and boasts a fair number of publishers. We were within a few brisk paces of the British Museum when Julie, my friend cried,
‘Oh! What a waste!’
She was pointing to a skip. It was a big, rusting hulk of a thing, piled high with stuffed, black bin liners and…….BOOKS. We both made a swift dive towards it. We could hardly believe what we were staring at. It was stacked with piles and piles of books! Brand New Books! WOW! We thought this cannot be true. We hauled out a few. They were large and glossy. Tomes, stuffed full of photographs on architecture, design, art deco, lofts, minimalism, staircases, typography. We glanced around us……where had it all come from?
Suddenly another bin bag was thrown onto the pile. The culprit looked a little….dusty!
‘Are these yours?’ we asked, indicating the books.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘We are the publishers and we are moving offices. So we’re having a clear out. Help yourselves.’
OH BOY!
Well, whilst we were rummaging through one end of the skip, making a pile of ‘definites’ and ‘possibles’ and wondering which one of us would clamber into the middle of the skip to get at those books just out of reach, we noticed that someone else had paused beside us.
‘Are these…..?’
‘Yes,’ we said. ‘Help yourself’
Next several students were up to their elbows. They didn’t ask to join, they just threw themselves, heart and soul, into the skip. Then a cyclist stopped, pulled out a book on architecture, tucked it under his arm and cycled off. More passers-by stopped and joined in. They were like bees around a honeypot. The buzz had come to Bloomsbury…well a skip in Bloomsbury. Julie and I changed ends. Our piles had already reached an unmanageable weight. These were BIG books, remember.
One rather lovely guy said he had to come over to see what was going on because from across the road the sight was bizarre…..smartly dressed people rummaging in a skip. We thanked him for the compliment on our clothes. He said he was not wearing his spectacles. Hmmm…. Then another guy said he would enjoy reading these books, especially as so many of them were in German, his native language.
Ah, yes, that was a SLIGHT downside to our find. Many of these magnificent books were in French and German as well as English. But hey….we can still look at the pictures, can’t we!
Sated, we decided to continue on our way to Liberty’s.
Ah…..BIG PROBLEM. Heavy books and lots of them.
‘We’ll have to buy a trolley,’ suggested Julie. ‘A cheap one.’
Unfortunately we didn’t find one cheap enough by Julie’s definition until we were halfway along Oxford Street. By then our arms were about ten feet longer than they had been at the start of the day and we were struggling along the street like a couple of primates.
However, a trolley we found and bought and it did well to survive a gruelling day being hauled around Liberty’s.
Actually the trolley did verywell. By the end of the day it was an ex-trolley. Its wheels were no more. One was in shreds, the other too hot to touch. The weight it had managed to transport across London and back out to the sticks had been far beyond its capabilities. We will remember it fondly.

We also give our thanks to the publisher who gave so many people so much pleasure.
Laurence King, Publishers extraordinaire. Your books are wonderful! Thank you……And may our arms one day resume their normal length.

Is it all worth the effort..........?

The angst of writing is great. The preparation, the avoidance, the preparation again. More tea, the light's not right (or write). More tea, perhaps something to eat. Another chair, the space is just not right, move the desk, rearrange the room, start decorating, maybe I need to move house. Let's get the paper, look at houses. What area, what can I afford? Well not this country, that's for sure....perhaps I should emigrate...let's find a map.

Ah....China.......!

Well, maybe not. But the house is definitely not in the right place, or the room, or the desk.Maybe I'll just settle for tea!

It's great when a day finishes and you can say that day was all write!
It's even better when a review is okay too. Check out Conversations with Mr Prain review in StopSmiling......and view it on our shelves.

Cover Story

Can a book cover tell a story? Can a book cover sell a book? Can a book cover make someone get their plastic out and WOW...buy the book. Er....yes! Check out Glimmer Train Press - those covers are absolute jewels.

There's a series of books about now - Fantasy/Horror me thinks.....these days I find it best to speed past interesting books in case my credit card jumps out and lands me in trouble. Very interesting covers - no apparent border/frame around the image and striking in appearance. That's not to say that borders are a bad thing ( or Borders....let's keep in their good books) - check out those on those glorious Glimmer Train Press books. Book covers are just so very important. They have to stand there on the shelves and do a lot of attracting! So if the cover makes someone stop and look and reach out and touch........! Move over chocolate!

Maturing nicely

We did mention somewhere in all our ramblings that some books may take a little bit longer to reach maturity than others. I think we may have likened them to cheese. (That's my choice but feel free to think whisky or wine instead). The September issue of Writers' News www.writersnews.co.uk ran an article on Ron McClarty's 15 year period off the shelf before his novel The Memory of Running met a publisher's taste buds. Okay, so it was aided and abetted by a rave from Stephen King and it had been recorded as an audio book in that time. It's enough to keep digits tapping away on keys though.

A recent roam through the blogsphere threw up another interesting read. A Newbie's Guide to Publishing can be found at www.jakonrath.blogspot.com. This is one man's quest to save the publishing industry. He is such an unselfish guy and wants to help a lot of people including booksellers and authors. But then he does have an old oil lamp, a genie, six wishes and a pile of unsold books to spur him on. It's a long blogspot but fun to read, especially when he gets on to his marketing tips. Enjoy the ride.

Life and how to play it

Well, we’ve been rummaging around in our brains this week, trying to deal with all the technology – the blogs in particular. A wonderful way of getting in touch with people without bombarding them with sales talk but it is a bit of a slog – there’s all the SEO and feeds etc to consider. I’m beginning to think that html is just a manifestation of the inner workings of my brain –chaotic gobbledegook. One very nice guy has offered me a few lessons. A few lifetimes might be needed, me thinks. It’s all so fast and cerebral but I do know the old brain has to get wrapped around it eventually.

That’s the beauty of books….they exist at a decent speed…..pick them up and put them down and make a cup of tea and unlike software/technology they are unlikely to have changed by the time you pick them up again.

I was walking (in a leisurely “I shouldn’t be in here because I have enough books already/ I can’t afford to buy any anyway/I’ll just have a quick shifty along the shelves while I’m here” way) through Waterstones last year and just by chance noticed a very, very slim book tucked away in the Mind Body Spirit section. I always go for the cover first and this was colourful! It’s also very tempting to see very slim books because the mindset goes ‘Ah, that won’t take long to read and at that size it’s probably quite cheap!’ I was right on all counts with this book. Even more remarkable is that it was first published in 1925, reached its 42nd reprinting in 1998 and is still going strong. Now that’s endurance!

It looks as though the publisher, C W Daniel Company Ltd now comes under the umbrella of Random House…..but I’ve checked and the book is still available. Worth checking out if life is being a bit tricky. “The Game of Life and how to play it” by Florence Scovel-Shinn.

Books On Shelves

We're underway...at last.

It really has been a labour of love putting this website together. The design and arty side is one thing - the technical "putting it all together on the web" is a whole new area (for me, the arty one). Then there is the concept behind it all - why we're doing it etc. Thankfully, we still think it's a brilliant idea. Let us fill you in with the details:

Way back in January we had a brilliant idea - well, anything can seem brilliant in January! It was to provide virtual shelf space for all the less well known writers and independent, small publishers of the world. We loved their work, wanted to see more of it, wanted others to see more. We wanted them to survive!

Our brilliant idea was to enable these unique voices to raise their profile, be seen, heard, bought and read. We wanted to bring them together on one site and so have greater strength in unity.

We think the name Books on Shelves sounds straight to the point and simple (just like us).

We appreciate the lasting value of books and we know that some may need extra time to mature, just like good cheese. Sometimes books (and cheeses) with enduring flavours, a unique after taste, wacky colouts, bizarre names etc. do not get fully appreciated immediately. They need time to loiter on shelves, time to be talked about, time to come into their own. Some will never be flavour of the month......but we still believe that they deserve some shelf space. And the book buying public also deserve a diverse range to choose from. We also know how frustrating it is for writers to survive when their work does not fit within the mainstream.

To this end we came up with the idea of becoming a gateway for writers, independent publishers and readers by providing virtual, limitless shelves for real books - good reads beyond the normal bookshelf fare.

Check us out. We've got a lot of shelf space to fill but we believe that even though we're young cheeses at the moment, the look of our site is still good and will encourage readers to come back again and again. Our aim is to excite. We want to reintroduce that WOW feeling when walking into a bookshop and seeing all those glorious books on the shelves, all ready and waiting to be bought and read.

The Beginning

The site is starting to take shape and getting ready for full launch =D

www.booksonshelves.com