Manny: The Denouement

I asked Manny why his stall wasn't here yesterday. He told me that when he woke up at his usual hour of 3 a.m. to go to the market he decided that he couldn't be bothered to come in. So he went back to sleep, and then when he woke up at the far more civilised hour of 7.30 he got up, went and got his hair cut, and spent the day in the pub.

Sounds very sensible to a girl who struggles to be up at 7 a.m. to open the shop at 9 a.m.

Matthew is more concerned at the tempting / disastrous example it sets to those who are their own boss...

Manny's back!

So is Crapital Gold. Silver lining / Cloud etc.

Do you get many orders?

A customer wanted a book that was only available from Haynes. As we don't do much in the way of car manuals we don't have an account with this particular small distributor. So when I phoned Haynes and established I was a trade customer the helpful operator let me know that as a new customer I could have the item for cover price with postage on top.

So let me get that straight... we get no discount with which to pay rent, rates, electricity etc. and then we give money away by paying for postage too which we can't palm off onto the customer. Erm... So how do we keep the business afloat I wonder?

The nice woman asked me if that was ok.

No it isn't bloody ok.

London 2, 'Oop North 0

Excellent footballing day yesterday...

But... I'm very scared at the moment. Manny and his veg stall has disappeared! It's tumbleweeds out there... Does he know something we don't? Or has he just gone on holiday...

Come back Manny! Even if we do have to listen to Crapital Gold all morning!

Random Saturday Thoughts...

It's Saturday - but all the big games (Chelsea vs Liverpool, Man Utd vs Arsenal, Spurs vs Fulham) are tomorrow - is it worth watching MOTD?

Why did we get busier after the French market packed up?

Was it anything to do with the rubbish dance music they were banging out from the sweet stall?

How many copies of "local artist" Banksy's book would we have sold if we hadn't decided graffiti on a wall was one thing but in a book was "stupid"? (We are selling loads of them now)

How many other books could we have sold loads of if we weren't so bloody opinionated/snobbish?

Will I still love A Glastonbury Romance this much after 1000 pages?

When I said to the kid in the Chelsea shirt earlier "big game tomorrow" and he looked blankly at me and was then prompted by his dad whispering "Chelsea play Liverpool tomorrow" was that real evidence of what I know to be the case - ie All Chelsea Fans are Fake Glory Hunting Gits

Would I still love Finn if he grew up and supported Chelsea?

(A defining moment of my football supporting life came when Fulham were first promoted to the Premiership. Our first game was at Old Trafford VS Man Utd. A real baptism of footballing fire. Louis Saha played for us in those days and scored the first goal in what turned out to be a blinding match - though it ended in glorious defeat for the men in white. On the way back we had to stand on the train. It was FULL of Man Utd fans on their way back to London. What was worse they all had reserved bloody seats! AND they were drinking red wine while we Fulham lads and lasses were quaffing Stella.)

How did I ever manage to drink Stella when it is so nasty?

Is that edition of the Flowers of Evil I just ordered really the best translation? How would I ever know being so bad at French? (My French teacher famously described my accent as "more Brondesbury (a small part of London where I grew up) than Bordeaux!"

Will Finn smile at me this evening? He was really grumpy earlier.

Hope Sarah Waters wins the Booker.

Will Chris Yates (author of How To Fish) come and buy a copy of JA Baker's Peregrine from us like he said he would at that lovely fish lunch organised (and paid for!) by Penguin?

B R A I N S T O P P E D W O R K I N G

I N E E D S O M E G O O D S L E E P

le marche francais

The french market is down the marsh today. We only found out yesterday. Thanks Lambeth. This tends to cause some friction with the regular stallholders and our Manny ain't too happy - he's got his England flags that he had for the world cup festooned around his veg stall. L'Entente cordiale indeed.

But I don't mind. Next to Manny's is a guy with an unfeasibly large selection of sausages... Guess what I'm having for dinner tonight.

Christina Aguilera is 4 foot 7.

While the Booker shortlist was being announced I've been watching an awful lot of television, music television to be precise. And watching video after video of Xtina A it's hard not to come to the conclusion that she is really quite petit.

I was reading some blogs and comments from somewhere today and it was suggested, from some well established independent bookshop somewhere, that it was our duty as booksellers to sacrifice all other forms of distraction to reading books and reading books only. That any time spent in front of the telly or reading a newspaper or staring into space is a betrayal of our customers and that if we weren't running 23 bookgroups a month we were somehow unworthy to run a bookshop.

Too much time with your head in a book is a bad thing. Head up, look around. Stare into space... now and again. Then when you return to proper reading... WHAM. Wow, how cool are books! In our modern distracted world I think it's so important to maintain a perspective on all our distractions. Taking a step back can help us as booksellers really focus on what's great about reading and let's be honest we're fighting for market share out there. Maybe the Booker shortlist provides a respite for a few brief weeks but it's not the whole answer. Enjoy it while it lasts and lets think about the other 48 weeks of the year to get people picking up a book instead of switching off and watching 22 year old pop midgets with a big, big voice.

Booker shortlist

So that Booker shortlist...

Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss (Hamish Hamilton)
Kate Grenville, The Secret River (Canongate)
M J Hyland, Carry Me Down (Canongate)
Hisham Matar, In the Country of Men (Viking)
Edward St Aubyn, Mother's Milk (Picador)
Sarah Waters, The Night Watch (Virago)

Go Sarah! Not that I've actually met everyone on the list, but if she's not the nicest, she has to be equal nicest at least. We're huge Waters fans at the shop. We were at the launch, y'know. They read out how the sales were doing and we were totally thrown to discover we'd sold 1pc of all the copies sold (we do not turn over 1pc of UK book sales on the whole, more's the pity.) Of course, I'm sure that Borderstones etc have caught up with us by now, but we were there first. And she's a local lass too! Someone dig out that photo of her in the shop...

Radio Goo Goo

Question: How many independent bookshops have their own radio show?

Answer: One, Crockatt & Powell, on air from October 5th.

Yes that's right we are going to have a radio show on Thursday afternoons on Resonance 104.4FM. Details are slightly sketchy at the moment but it will be in the afternoon, either 3pm or 3:30pm.

We hope to have a varied and interesting schedule comprising author interviews, author readings, recordings of poetry events in the shop and perhaps a kind of "books of the moment" slot with Marie and I arguing about our favourite books.

So far we have an interview with Louise Welsh and Zadie Smith reading in the shop. Ben Markovits will be recorded on 28th September when he reads from Either Side of Winter at the shop.

We also hope to record a poetry event we have on Monday 18th September. This is a turtle event, part of an anarchic series of "happenings" dreamed up by Michael Shamberg.

So even if you can't make it down the Loo you will still be able to enjoy our events...After all Resonance is an internet radio station as well as broadcasting on FM across London.

It could happen to you

It could, it really really could.

The never-ending march of technology

Can anybody really see this take off? Or this? I mean, really?

(Good comments if you scroll down - what kind of person reads Crime and Punishment on a PDA?)

C & P Top 10

1: Either Side of Winter by Ben Markovits (C & P Book of the Month)
2: Remainder by Tom McCarthy
3: Nobody Told Us We Were Defeated by Rory McCarthy
4: Damned Utd by David Peace
5: Secret River by Kate Grenville
6: The Very Hungry Caterpillar (Large Board Book) Eric Carle
7: The Tribes of Britain by David Miles
8: Untold Stories by Alan Bennett
9: As Used on the Famous Nelson Mandela by Mark Thomas
10: This is London by Miroslav Sasek

As you can see our bestsellers bear absolutely no relation to the national norms (as usual!)

Great to see people supporting our book of the month and boosting Ben Markovits to the top of our chart. He will be reading at C & P on the 27th...

Stunned by the early days of a romance...

No I'm not about to abandon my young family and lovely wife to run off somewhere exotic in a fit of "shi* here comes another birthday am I really THAT old madness"...

...but I have fallen in love.

With John Cowper Powys and A Glastonbury Romance. This is a book I have thought about reading for a very long time. It is, after all, a very long book (1120 pages in my edition) and I always think hard before starting long books. I used to put it on the table at Waterstones and every now and then someone would buy it. (Exactly the kind of book they stopped me from putting on the table leading to me quitting and seeking out the independent sector! Selling "every now and then" is not what W's is about any more. Some would say this was a good thing. (Shareholders) Others (Book nuts) disagree.)

I digress. Let's just say that almost from the first moment I started A Glastonbury Romance I knew I was in good hands. This is the kind of book to surrender yourself to completely. I love the way he writes, I love the way even the buds on the trees seem to be characters in the book. I love the sense that there is an aspect of life that lies entirely beyond the realm of work, money and all sensible things, that the world is here to be enjoyed and noticed that this is vital not just some lazy notion.

All we have is now says Cowper (and the Flaming Lips) and everything is here in each moment if only we could pause for a moment and take notice.

(Now where are those pills?)

No, seriously! Blake lovers, dreamers everywhere - find a copy and sink inside. You have over a thousand pages of pure literary pleasure to explore...

Crapital Gold FM

You don't have to say you love me just be close at hand, you don't have to stay forever I will understand...

We love Manny and his veg stall but can he please please please change radio stations...

And Now A Word From Our Sponsors

A story from USA Today plops into the Microsoft Outlook Express Inbox on our Compaq laptop. I click on it eagerly with our Logitech wireless mouse. It's about product placement in books...

What I particularly love about product placement in books is the notion that the product will blend seamlessly into the rest of the story, nestling its way unnoticed into the brain of the reader who will have no idea why they suddenly want to buy a Ford. It's bad enough when you see someone drinking a coke in a film, but at least there are a dozen other things on screen your eye could rest on. Product placement in books is the equivalent of zooming right in on the can of coke while the lead actor says "I love Coca Cola! It's such a tasty, refreshing beverage! And, by the way, frankly my dear I don't give a damn."

My absolute favourite example of literary product placement was a book that I once saw which was sponsored by the Gatwick Express. The entire first chapter of the book was devoted to the narrator talking about how brilliant it was shopping in Gatwick airport, so much so that she would go and shop there even when she didn't have a flight to catch.

Of course, people mention brand names in their books all the time, but usually not with one eye on the sales figures. I'm not sure, for example, how sales of Kool-Aid were affected after the release of the Electric Kool-Aid Acid test. (I can make a guess about sales of Acid, though.) Where authors mention brands, it's generally to situate the characters in time, place, class - to create context, in other words. It's to aid your suspeension of disbelief.

Product placement is the opposite: it's clunky. It stops you short. It makes you forget you were reading about a character and makes you start thinking about toothpaste. Why any author would wish their book to be compromised in this way is a mystery to me. OK, it's not that much of a mystery - it's money of course; but accepting product placement in your novel is a surefire way to make lots of money from advertising and none whatsoever from sales. And I know where I'd rather my cash came from.

...she said, smoothing down the fabric of her Zara skirt and adjusting the straps of her Gap top...

C&P Blog in another literary post shock!

You wait around for ages for posts about books from a bookshop blog and before you know it...

I've never been able to read JG Ballard. I've tried and tried but have always failed by page 15 to connect in anyway with his dystopian worlds. His new book Kingdom Come came in and I thought I'd give it my customary bash assuming it would be on the rejects pile toot sweet. But you know what? I get this one! I've got 15 pages in and I'm hooked. It's about the weird satellite towns that rub up along the M25. His descriptive and observational writing is so spot on that I can feel the boredom and shock of driving through these wastelands.

I do hope he doesn't mess this one up and go all weird... It's very mundane at the moment but incredibly biting. Fingers crossed.

Jonathan Franzen: The Discomfort Zone

As an antidote to the we're-all-gonna-die futuristic sentiments of The Road, I am now taking in a dose of reality courtesy of Jonathan Franzen's memoir, due out in October. It's pleasingly slim and pleasingly reminiscent of The Corrections in its meticulous observation and dry wit, but it's not particularly pleasingly unapocalyptic. In fact Franzen's clear-eyed view of the inequalities of contemporary America reads like a prequel to the social and environmental demise and destruction of McCarthy's novel. He nails the problem beautifully in this paragraph, taken from an early chapter:

"This is great time to be an American CEO, a tough time to be the CEO's lowest-paid worker. A great time to be Wal-Mart, a though time to be in Wal-Mart's way, a great time to be an encumbent extremist, a tough time to be a moderate challenger. Fabulous to be a defense contractor, shitty to be a reservist, excellent to have tenure at Princeton, grueling to be an adjunct at Queens College, outstanding to manage a pension fund, lousy to rely on one, better than ever to be bestselling, harder than ever to be mid-list, phenomenal to win a Texas Hold 'Em tournament, a drag to be a video-poker addict."

His place in the pecking order he defines equally clearly.

"My biggest worries on the day [of Hurricane Katrina] were whether I should feel bad about quitting work at three and whether my favourite organic store would have Meyer lemons for the marguaritas I wanted to make apres golf... When I flew back to New York, I worried that Katrina's aftermath might create unpleasant turbulence on my flight."

We wealthy westerners are the Franzens of the world. Damn it. We're all gonna die.

Apocalypse re-visited

This is actually a comment to the post below but I wanted to stick in a few links...

The most pant-soilingly scary apocalyptic vision has to be this. You may scoff but if you have a look at the date on the cover you'll see that to a 10 year old boy this was indeed the end of the world. Deadworld, where all life has been declared a crime since only the living commit crimes. I may be 35 now but reading that still gives me the heebeejeebees.

Other apocalyptic visions... I am legend by Richard Matheson and the movie of (apparently a remake is in production with Will Smith as Neville due out next year - cooooool). Mary Shelley had a stab in The Last Man. Wells' Shape of Things to Come is pretty scary and prescient. And I always thought of Waiting for the Barbarians by Coetzee as a pretty apocalyptic novel.

Hard to go past George Miller's excellent Mad Max movies (the first two) and Costner's Waterworld is a grossly under-rated pic. Planet of the Apes, Night of the Living Dead, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Terminator films (not pt 3), Kiss Me Deadly (1955, Robert Aldrich - what was in that box?), Soderbergh's re-make of Solaris is pretty bleak, War of the Worlds starts promisingly but has a cop-out ending.

I played a computer game last year called Half-Life 2 which was unbearably apocalyptic and seat-jumpingly scary.

All of which to say is that I'd happily sit through all of the above a dozen times than attempt the new McCarthy. But then again I'd rather chew my own arm off than waste time with his torpid, unpuntuated prose.

Cormac McCarthy - The Road

As long term readers of this blog will know opinion is divided at Crockatt & Powell over the writer Cormac McCarthy.

I love his writing. The Border Trilogy in particular (the final part is still one of only two books to make me cry) His most recent novel No Country For Old Men is perhaps the most underated book published in years. Most reviewers treated it as a simple thriller, ignoring or failing to notice the layers of meaning, the politics, the anger that churned beneath the pared down plot. No Country For Old Men is a book about the beginning of the end of a society and culture (that of the US) that showed the redundancy of a culture that worshipped at the alter of Supply and Demand. (What is the cocaine trade if not capitalism taken to a logical conclusion?)

Marie loves his writing too.

Adam thinks he is the pits - too "poetic" and a waster of words.

When a proof of McCarthy's new novel came in Marie snaffled it. She didn't tell me either cos she knew I would be furious! Well, after three consecutive nights of nightmares she has finally finished it and claims it is "the most terrifying book I have ever read". Where No Country For Old Men raged at the failures of American consumer culture The Road takes place in a world and landscape that has totally collapsed...

It is sitting here in front of me now. I'm going to have to start reading it...

"When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he'd reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world."

Excuse me now - I have a book to read!

Finn Takes a Holiday but still Manages to Explore The Relationship Between Electricity and Salt Water

For days daft dad had been singing "Oh we do like to be beside the seaside" to Finn. His tinyness had assumed this was part of the usual repertoire of bizarre songs that dad sang but now, as the car pulled up at a point that did indeed seem to be beside the seaside, he furrowed his brow and prepared for a new experience.

"Everybody's here!" said dad, looking at the huge queues at both chip shops.

"Well last time it was November" pointed out mum with a smile.

A short while later, as the sky darkened and huge clouds massed, the car stopped again.

"Bet it's not so packed here" said dad "Not with the power station on the horizon."

Finn found himself strapped to dad's front and then they were off. Mum and dad huddled under their umbrella as large drops began to fall. By the time they reached the beach most people were heading the other way.

"Look at that" said mum pointing at a lovely curve of colour that hung in the air above the bay. "A rainbow."

But almost as soon as it appeared the rainbow vanished. Everything went dark and it began to pour.

"Let's get under here!" said dad, ducking beneath the overhanging roof of a shed. There was just enough room for the three of them. A bedraggled man, his long hair dripping, laughed at the sight and called out - "Surely time for an ice-cream?"

Dad smiled then said something under his breath that Finn didn't quite catch.

"It'll be over in a minute and then we'll have our walk."

Finn watched as lightning ripped the air. He listened to the clouds as they crashed together, groaning and rumbling furiously. Rain lashed the pebbles and ran off the roof of the hut in small streams. From time to time a dog walker came off the beach smiling ruefully, soaked to the skin, a sopping mutt with a thousand yard stare in tow.

After a while it did stop raining.

"Right Finn - this is the sea!"

Dad held our tiny titan up, muttering about ancestral voices and sailing scotsmen, so that he could look out over...

...what? A huge expanse of grey green that undulated into the distance. Where this "sea" met the land there was an interesting sound effect. It was a bit like the sound of wind through trees but there were elements of bathtime in there too.

They stared at the horizon where the rain still slanted from the bellies of black clouds. On the shore Finn saw a large building with a white dome. As previously discussed the head is big but the brain is (so far) small and yet the little one has other means of gathering knowledge at his disposal. He sucked his fingers.

Seawater.

Lightning.

Then the sun blazed down as the last of the cloud blew out to sea.

"Oh that's the nuclear power station" said dad. "It's a great way of making electricity, no greenhouse emisions."

"But the waste takes millions of years to decompose!" objected mum.

Finn was frowning.

Finn waved his arms and gurgled. The power station shook.

Finn kicked his legs and was a little sick. The power station turned into a bunch of flowers.

Blimey!

As usual nobody noticed. The adults had already turned and were crunching off down the beach. But Finn was thinking.

All that power in the sun, sea and sky. There has to be a better way of harnessing it...

We didn't sell our souls at the crossroads

A tv production company offered us £1500 to use our shop to film a candid camera style prank show.

We turned them down.

Our principles are intact even if our bank account isn't.

It still hurts though...

That's a lot of spondoolies...

Humour Me...

As a bookseller there are some things I love being asked (Read anything good recently? Do you accept credit cards?) and other things that are more problematic (Do you have that book, you know, the sort of green one...)

Perhaps my least favourite thing to be asked is "Can you recommend a funny book? Something that will make me laugh?"

Why? Hardly ANYTHING that is supposed to be funny makes me laugh. (Even my infant son has a perma-frown after just two months!)

But this made me roar out loud. Then I cried with laughter reading it to my wife...

Fyodor is a Russian emigre living in Berlin. He dreams of being a writer and hangs around with other literary aspirants. The following takes place at an evening meeting where people read things they have written to an audience of their peers.

"...as the idiotic symbolism of the tragedy became ever deeper, more involved and less comprehensible, the painfully repressed, subterraneously raging hilarity more and more desperately needed an outlet, and many were already bending over, afraid to look, and when the Dance of the Maskers began in the square, someone - Getz it was - coughed, and together with the cough there issued a certain additional whoop, whereupon Getz covered his face with his hands and after a while emerged again with a senselessly bright countenance and humid, bald head, while on the couch Tamara had simply lain down and was rocking as if in the throes of labour, while Fyodor, who was deprived of protection, shed floods of tears, tortured by the forced noiselessness of what was going on inside him. Unexpectedly Vasiliev turned in his chair so ponderouusly that a leg collapsed with a crack and Vasiliev lurched forward with a changed expression, but did not fall, and this event, not funny in itself, served as a pretext for an elemental, orgiastic explosion to interrupt the reading, and while Vasiliev was transferring his bulk to another chair, Herman Ivanovich Busch, Knitting his magnificent but quite unfruitful brow, jotted something on the manuscript with a pencil stub, and in the relieved calm an unidentified woman uttered something in a separate final moan..."

I'll leave it there.

Did you laugh?

BTW Can you guess the author?

Memory cul-de-sac

Anybody remember the Gin Blossoms? Arizona band of the early nineties? I've been seeing the trailer for some medical drama on 5 or 4 or somewhere that has a song from those ulster MOR rockers Snow Patrol over the top. An inoffensive enough tune but it seriously reminded of a great country rock album that was one of my favourites from years ago. Couldn't remember the band or album for the life of me but I did remember that the guitarist/ song-writer was an alcoholic depressive who shot himself at 32 which was more than enough for google...

...New Miserable Experience by the Gin Blossoms, 1992 (yikes) and probably one of my top5 played records that year. Not ground-breaking or terribly rock and roll but definitely hook-tastic and with some great all-time depressing lyrics about being a depressive alcoholic in your 30's. Thanks to iTunes I've got it again after a gap of 12 years (I tend to clear out all my stuff now and again) and it rocks and pops. 'Lost Horizons' and 'Hey Jealousy' are thumping great drivin' down the highway tunes. Which reminds me I have to go and seek out some of the early Springsteen small-town classics - Nebraska, The River. J'adore l'americaina.

As I write this I am listening to Kelly Clarkson. File under Guilty Pleasures. Anybody noticing a theme here in some of the music I like...

(The Credibility Barometer: The last thing I downloaded was a compilation of Ethiopian funk/reggae/soul/blues from the 70's - Ethiopiques vol. 13. The Golden Seventies. Does that cancel out Since You Been Gone?)

Any other cred-busting guilty pleasures out there?

Finn and the Bird in the Tree

One evening dad took Finn in to the garden to check on the beans. While they were at it they admired the bright red Bishop Dahlias and dad brushed the dark foliage against Finn's face, making him grimace. The flowers were very red. They held the small but large headed hero's attention for a moment or two...

...and then it happened.

A sound cut through the evening noises of Camberwell on a Friday night. Through the shouts of joy and pain, the yells of excited children, the circling police helicopters, the reggae music and hip-hop blasting from distant car stereos. While all these man-made sounds were harsh and grating this was a sound that caressed the inner ear, that cooled the brain and made thought clearer.

Finn hadn't yet mastered the art of speech but his telepathy was pretty good. He looked at dad with his big eyes. Then he looked in the direction of the beautiful sound. He concentrated.

"Oh That's a bird" said dad. "I think it's a wren. Sounds big but that loud sound comes from a teeny tiny little bird".

Finn stared up into the tree where dad was pointing. An aeroplane passed overhead. The bird was speaking!

"Isn't this a lovely evening?" said the bird. "Aren't we all lucky to be here on this lovely evening?"

Finn smiled. He chortled. He sucked dad's neck.

Wonderful that such a little bird could make such a big difference.

Terrible that they seemed to be the only two people nearby to even notice his song.

It's saturday so it must be football. (Bad language can be heard on the terraces)

Wow! On Matthew's recommendation I've started The Damned Utd. by David Peace. I'm only 50 pages in but it's a staggering work that is quite simply the best novel I've read in ages. It's also like nothing else I can think of. It feels like a completely new, groundbreaking form that Peace is writing here but with overtones of the epic prose poems of the past. It also manages to be a work that can evoke and awaken so many of your own memories. Peace's turn of phrase is so clear, so pointed that sentences can send you into a reverie of your own past. I also can't think of a novel where all the characters are real people and all the situations are real. It is about Brian Clough's 44 days in charge of Leeds Utd in 1974 yet Peace really transcends any docu-drama elements to create a complete world. This has been called the greatest football novel yet. I'd say it is that but it is also a novel about men and one of the greatest I've come across that really gets what it means to be male. Take this passage. A paragraph that encapsulates the british male in all his grubby, boozy, leering, frightened, posing glory:

'The player's lounge, Elland Road. Deep in the west stand, off the main corridor. Round another corner. Two doors and a well-stocked bar. Low ceiling and sticky carpet. Easy chairs and no windows, only mirrors. Mirrors, mirrors on the walls. The smell of shampoo and christmas aftershave as they file in from the dressing room in their denim and their leather, with their gold chains and their wet hair, teasing and touching, picking and pinching, a gang of apes after a fuck, they form a circle, their heads as low as their knees in their easy chairs, they spread their legs and touch their balls and try not to look my way-
My Way, indeed.'

I love the phrase, 'a gang of apes after a fuck'. That pretty much sums up any group of men in this country doesn't it? That's what we are, a gang of apes waiting and trying to fuck and 'a gang of apes after a fuck'. Vulgar and crude but utterly brilliant.

Oh, and no need to add that it didn't make the Booker long list is it? It's not really a surprise.

(And in the spirit of the terraces and male bonding my uncle told my dad a joke who then told me: Did you hear about the man who mistook his sleeping pills and his viagra? He ended up having 40 wanks)

Death of the author...

No No No No No Don't stop reading! This isn't a piece of critical theory...

...just an interesting take on the art of literary translation.

I have huge admiration for anyone that spends time translating books from other languages into English. What would my life be like sans Dostoevsky, Szerb, Murakami to name but a mere fraction of the writers I love for whom English is not their first language. (Ok - I might be a multi-linguist by now but it's FAR more likely I wouldn't have been exposed to their work)

I recently met Robert Chandler who translated the excellent (and bizarre) book The Railway by Hamid Ismailov. He also translated a book of Russian Short Stories for penguin recently that has flown off the shelves. When I suggested his work was a labour of love he said "Yes, I do labour but I really, really love it so that's ok..." My kind of guy.

Anyway to cut to the point I just had a conversation with an Italian student about literary translation. She said she had done translations for business before and it was dead easy - you could be very literal. But now she was trying literary translation. This, according to her, is an altogether more complex process. You have to find the right words to convey the sense but to do this means you can't translate literally. But every liberty you take has to be checked with the author leading to vast e-mail exchanges and long international phone calls.

"It's so much better if they're dead" she said.

SO WATCH OUT UK AUTHORS!!!

If a rather attractive Italian lady contacts you and wants to translate your work - DON'T BE FLATTERED!

BE AFRAID, BE VERY AFRAID.

After all we all know what happens to sales the moment an author dies...

It's Official! There is no crime in London!

That's the only explanation I can muster for a scene witnessed today on the Hungerford foot bridge over the Thames on my way to the Strand.

A little Chinese guy has had a pitch on the bridge for the last year selling little whistles that make a noise like birdsong for £2.50 a pop. He's tiny and takes up no space and is surely barely eking a living.

Today, two of the Met's finest were standing over him talking into their radios and preparing to arrest him. At first I was alarmed but then it occured to me that finally there is no crime left! All the drug dealers must have been locked up. All the sleeper cells found and disbanded. All the burglars reformed. Why else would the police commit valuable resources for the flimsiest of 'offences' - selling bird whistles without a license.

So my hearty congratulations, London bobbies. Well done lads and lasses and keep up the good work!

I don't know if you or any of your minions read our blog but if you or they do...

"Eccentricity is not, as dull people would have us believe, a form of madness. It is often a kind of innocent pride, and the man of genius and the aristocrat are frequently regarded as eccentrics because genius and aristocrat are entirely unafraid of and uninfluenced by the opinions and vagaries of the crowd."

Edith Sitwell

Big Head

Finn went to see the Doctor yesterday. You will be pleased to hear she described him as "perfect".

However while he is of completely average height he is in the top 2% in terms of head size.

Brainbox or boaster? Only time will tell...

The all-new and improved 8th circle of hell.

My mum had never been to Harrods. So I took her there. And we looked at the Dodi and Di memorial where people were taking pictures with their phones. And we didn't buy over priced tea. And we got the hell out of there. 23 minutes all up.

I was reminded of those medieval paintings by Bosch, Breugel and Cranach of judgment day. Something about the twisted, contorted faces and the rampant rudeness and the pinched snootiness of those people who believe they're a cut above because they have money. And the poor, bewildered tourists who looked like they'd wandered into Hades itself.

I love London but I guess one of the reasons it is the way it is, is it's greed. Unfettered gluttony and rapacity. Luckily there are other bits that I like. And I don't have to go to the ones I don't like.

(I didn't even go on a spying mission to the Waterstones in Harrods but I did go to the one in Hampstead which is a damn fine bookshop. If only they took out all those stoopid promotions it would be one of the best. Whoever's working up there knows their stuff, dammit. Many recce's are planned. I do like industrial espionage)

Executive, Legislature, Judiciary

Or, Authors, Publishers, Booksellers.

The three-pronged model for government is, in theory, an ideal one for the post-enlightenment democracy. The executive writes the laws, the legislature tweaks those laws and decide which ones are passed and the judiciary upholds some of those laws and throws out others. It is a circular form with no one branch, in theory, becoming more powerful than the other.

In the book trade, similarly, the author writes the books, the publishers look at those books and decides which ones to publish and the booksellers support some books and dismiss others. Each branch needs the other in a harmonious circle and everybody's happy.

However, one look at our cousins across the atlantic will soon realise that this model is, at the present time and for the most part, total bollocks. Oh well.

We had a visit from Richard Charkin, le grand fromage at Macmillan, yesterday after we had an 'exchange of opinions' over at his blog. Good on him for coming in and a jolly illuminating chat it was too about the nature of the book trade and its future. However one thing became abundantly clear soon after his departure and I think Marie, who was there giving her tuppence worth, will agree. Not only are we not reading the same page, we're not reading the same book. In fact we're not even in the same library. The circle of trust has become a tangle of second-guessing with lots of misunderstandings, dead-ends and dark places only broken occasionally by the light. Oh well.

'May you live in interesting times', as the old curse goes.

Hate Mail

A letter arrives from the Royal Mail - sorry, I mean Consignia - no, I mean the Royal Mail.

Dear Customer,

I recently wrote to you concerning Mail Deliveries to your premises on a Saturday.

So far so good. Except those egregious capital letters - what are they doing there? - but OK, I can understand what is being said.

As no reply has been received I would be grateful if you would confirm that you want your mail ever retained and delivered on Monday or delivered on a Saturday.

Confirm? Ever? What?

The same could be said about festive holidays when firms shut, mail will be delivered on the next working day.

You've lost me. Was that a question?

If however you want something on a mid / long term permanent basis then you will need to apply for our Business Keepsafe service.

*Anything* on a mid / long term permanent basis? Like a house? Or a pet? Or a boyfriend? Can the Royal Mail provide them all? And can we define permanent in this context? Doesn't 'mid term' imply temporary? What is mid term anyway? I thought it was something to do with Presidents.

OK, so I do understand what this letter is trying to say - just about - but this kind of poor English just makes me furious. Surely a communications firm should hire someone who can actually communicate?

Royal Mail, usually I charge 25p per word for this kind of thing but you can have this for free:

Please could you let us know whether you would like your mail delivered on a Saturday or if you would prefer it to be held and delivered on Monday morning. Similarly, whether on public holidays you would prefer your mail to be delivered on the next working day. Note that should you require any long-term storage of your post, you will need to apply for our Business Keepsafe facility.

Twenty seconds' work. And I thank you.

Boo!

I've just been on holiday in darkest Dorset (back in the shop tomorrow, if you missed me) and while I was away I had the disconcerting experience of turning into a character from a famous novel.

Bear with me on this.

I had set up my computer by the downstairs window of the cottage where I was staying and every morning as I worked on my novel (I didn't say it was a fun holiday) a group of three small children would come and play just outside. At first they ignored me and I tried to ignore them, but after a while I heard them talking about "the lady on the computer". Soon afterwards, they developed a new game. One or other of them would creep up to the window and look inside, and when I noticed and looked at them, they would scream and run away.

Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce myself. I am Boo Radley.

(If we have time, I can also tell you about how in three days the only person I spoke to was an old man who came and knocked on my door and accused me of stealing his metal detector, but I think we should save it for another time, as I'm tired, I haven't unpacked yet, and I don't know which major work of literature it references.)

Football (sorry!)

Most exciting thing to happen in football today?

Nah, not the premiership kicking off (Fulham don't play till tomorrow anyway. Who? Oh only Man Utd up at Old Trafford. I won't be going as Finn is too young for all the swearing and drinking but a couple of mates are going to be doing some yelling on my behalf. Off to a flying start as usual I suspect. As a Fulham fan the start of the season is always bitter sweet - particularly since beating Chelsea and Liverpool at home last year - the league and european champs -that will be hard to top...I digress)

No the most exciting thing happening in football today is The Damned Utd by David Peace.

Following on from his extraordinary treatment of the miners strike in GB84 Peace goes for Brian Clough's ill fated reign at Leeds Utd.

David Peace is quite simply among the best writers in the UK. He is a Yorkshire man himself and understands the animal nature of football and of that "Dirty" Leeds team of the seventies in particular. This is NOT a book about the "beautiful game". Football is not bloody beautiful - it's war. (But war fought in the way it should be fought - IE Nobody gets killed)

So there we have it - the best footie book in ages and perhaps the best footie novel ever?

Buy it from Crockatt & Powell - www.crockattpowell.com NOW.

To Katie from Gordon, 18.8.1985

It's musical bedrooms round my gaff at the moment. The folks are staying so my flatmates been shunted out (he's doing a job in Birmingham, we haven't turfed him onto the street) and I'm in his room. By the side of his bed is a pile of my old books I've yet to read. When I woke up this morning the first title my eyes fell upon was The Unbearable Lightness of Being, a book I've been meaning to get round to for ages. Infact I even picked it up in the shop the other day to 'borrow' when I remembered my old secondhand copy.

So I opened this edition and on the inside cover page was an inscription, 'To Katie from Gordon, 18.8.1985'. It was exactly 21 years to the day that this book was first given. It made me instantly despondent. What happened to Katie and Gordon? Was it a relationship that had long ended? Had Katie given away all the books Gordon had given her? Had they broken up over this book? Or had they survived and merely cleaned out a bunch of old crap? Or was it an attempt by Gordon, given the story of the book, to get into Katie's pants?

But then I realised that I was despondent because I just didn't care about Katie and Gordon. In fact worse, they were spoiling my book. Katie and Gordon belonged in their own fiction, indeed it might make a basis for a story but here and now their reality was tainting me and tainting this book forever.

I like my books untouched, box-fresh, new. I don't want someone else's cast-offs. And I don't want signed copies either (the thought of an authors voice in my head is unbearable when I read fiction, their signature at the front of the book only compounds this mania - look out for a future post on the Death of the Author - indeed when I worked at Pan with a revolving door of authors coming in to sign I had to run a mile so anyone's books I admired didn't have the chance to be effected by the author turning out to be a complete knob. This happened anyway more than a few times. Naming no names of course). I'd rather a thousand copies of a book being read by a thousand individuals than a single book being passed through a thousand different pairs of hands. The outcome may be the same but somehow there is a diminishment, an erosion of the power of the book in the latter case. A books new-ness increases it's capacity for impact. A book can change your life but if you know that the copy you are holding has already changed numerous lives don't you feel short-changed? You may know that a text has been read and appreciated for years but there is something in the physical nature of holding a book that gives you a more intimate relationship with it's contents.

It may be considered spooky that I had picked up Katie's book 21 years to the day after Gordon had given it to her but I don't believe in that stuff. It was just a coincidence. And now I have to 'borrow' that new copy from the shop.

An experiment...

Our book of the month this month is Either Side of Winter by Ben Markovits.

This post is intended to be a place where people can discuss their thoughts about this book. If there is a strong response we may go ahead with our plans for a bulletin board on the website where people can discuss books etc. So here goes, a little different to the normal blog but...

I had heard various things about Ben Markovits on the literary grape vine, mostly with reference to his debut The Syme Papers. Readers were divided. They either thought it a work of total genius or found it a bit heavy going. I looked at it and decided not to read it.

When Either Side of Winter appeared I was tempted again but initially resisted. This was mainly because of a review of The People's Act of Love by James Meek that Ben wrote in the TLS. I loved The People's Act and felt a bit defensive about the review. Who IS this Markovits? Who does he think he is?

Then Ben came into the shop I was working in (pre C & P) one evening with his wife. He asked if he could sign his book and I said yes. We then chatted for a while about booky stuff and it turned out we had a few mates in common (always the way in bookselling/publishing). The conversation changed my opinion of the man and I decided, I have to say with some reluctance, to give Either Side a go.

Initially I was unconvinced. There was something weird about the sentence structures I could not quite put my finger on, something almost Germanic. But I carried on reading until I became used to the style. I began to appreciate that this was a writer who understood not only the way that people think but how they feel, how changes in the weather or the most tiny, insignificant moments became vastly important to the individual concerned. As the story progressed and the connections and relationships became more developed I realised that I was falling in love! Now I verge on the evangelical when it comes to Ben and his books...

So what do you think? Come in and pick up a copy or order online - join the debate.

Ben Markovits - Brilliant or boring? All opinions welcome!

The Time Vortex

I have just returned from the black hole of time they call 'fiddling with the website'. We now have a navigation bar with lots of pretty colours that change colour when you hover over them. Oooooh. I'm really really chuffed. But it won't stay that way for long...

...and another thing

Why the Freak did they have to bring out a FILM of Miami Vice.

After the Davey (great motto eh?) thing (wild front ears etc) there came the horror of Miami Vice.

"Oi Crockatt! Where's Tubbs?"

AAAARRRGGGH!

Oh well.

Better get it over with.

Top 10 Again

We are SO busy today...I'm rushed off my feet...

Top 10

1: On Beauty by Zadie Smith
2: There Was An Old Lady WHo Swallowed A Fly (board book)
3: Remainder by Tom McCarthy
4: Camomile Lawn by Mary Wesley (flew off the table - new biog out - great summer read)
5: Secret Life of Trees by Colin Tudge
6: Blink by Malcolm Gladwell
7: Summer Book by Tove Jansson
8: The Leopard by Lampedusa
9: Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian by Marina Lewycka
10: Journey by Moonlight by Antal Szerb


As you can see there have been a few new entries and a couple that hold their position. Zadie tops our chart with her Orange Prize winner. The table continues to sell strongly while the bestsellers according to the rest of the world hardly appear at all.

In Praise Of...

The Idler

We at C & P love the Idler, that lazy look at the world produced by the clever (and hardworking!) Tom Hodgkinson and co.

Of course being lazy isn't much use in running a business. But being lazy is also an art. And extremely political. In fact being really lazy takes a lot of work!

But I digress.

In this issue of The Idler there is a piece on parenting. (Baby bore? Moi?) In esssence the idea is that kids are pretty good at bringing themselves up. Left to their own devices they are more than likely to develop into functional human beings.

I won't quote from the article here - you can come and buy it off us!

One quote then:

Oh, Health and safety! How many crimes against humanity have been committed in your name?

Finn Visits The UN and Achieves World Peace Through the Simple Yet Effective Manipulation of his Face

Please note: No infants were intoxicated in the construction of this e-card sent to my sis in NZ...

Another dreamy day began in South London. The birds were singing outside in the gentle August drizzle, fighting for natural sound against the pneumatic drills of a group of workmen contracted to dig up the street. The cat was chewing catnip and waiting for the mice to make a wrong move so he could have some breakfast. Dad was drinking coffee and mum was doing a crossword.

Meanwhile Finn, small yet heroic, was bouncing in his bouncy chair and contemplating the possibility of world changing action...

...before anyone could react he had leapt a thousand miles or so (startling an albatross mid-atlantic) and landed in the UN building in New York where world leaders had gathered to discuss a new resolution.

Mr Bush was speaking about the need for "credible action" in the face of "terror".

Around the table other world leaders were nodding or shaking their heads. It seemed that another war was inevitable in the quest for peace. As usual everybody had a different analysis and what was even more familiar - all these wise men thought they were right.

Finn wriggled at the back. Oh dear. You know what's coming don't you?

An ALMIGHTY fart! Pong and awe! The mother of all air biscuits!

What was worse someone had left a microphone lying around so the cacophony was broadcast at high volume into the ear pieces of all the assembled diplomatic and state representing folk.

Woah.

Everybody stopped talking, listening, nodding (or shaking) their heads and turned to stare at our diminuative darling.

And what did Finn do?

He smiled.

He smiled and the leaders were confounded.

Their words of war melted in the face of such a lovely spectacle.

Suddenly going to war didn't seem such a good idea. After all we all were little once. Before the demands of society made us sensible and forced us to get jobs etc we idled the days away, smiling and farting.

In an instant World Peace was declared.

Finn leapt off to the Empire State. With another, rather overenthusiastic, bound he landed in Moscow before jumping back to Camberwell.

Nobody even noticed he had gone.

Cinemas don’t offer discounted prices for the latest Harry Potter film, so why do publishers allow booksellers to discount their bestselling titles?

That's from an article in the Times.

Answers on a postcard, please.

Every man and his dog's got a blog

I was going to put this on our roll of honour but he kinda repeats himself a bit.

The Woman's Booker

So, as discussed, the C&P boys are not Booker fans, but personally I love it, as it's a brilliant excuse to have some good old-fashioned arguments about books, which is the reason I got into bookselling in the first place. Drop by the shop any time with an opinion or two, and you'll see what I mean... Anyway it's probably just going to be me taking an interest from the shop floor, but feel free to add your views and let the games begin!

Here is the longlist. I've hardly read any of it yet (hardbacks don't fit in my handbag) but for what it's worth, and in order to get the ball rolling, I've added my initial comments:

Peter Carey 'Theft: A Love Story' (Faber & Faber) - I thought this was great, but I'm a big Carey fan. I think a lot of people found the CAPITAL LETTER BITS quite annoying, and they can't give it to him every year, so I reckon shortlist but no cigar or maybe even a headline-grabbing SHOCK OMMISSION. (It'll win now I've said that. I am always wrong except about Vernon God Little which I knew would win because I loathed it.)

Kiran Desai 'The Inheritance of Loss' (Hamish Hamilton) - don't know much about this

Robert Edric 'Gathering the Water' (Doubleday) - or this, oh dear...

Nadine Gordimer 'Get a Life' (Bloomsbury) - Not read this one (look, I'm not the manager of the shop or anything...) but Gordimer is always a safe pair of hands.

Kate Grenville 'The Secret River' (Canongate) - Cracking and, in my opinion, a step up from her Orange award winner, which was pretty damn good anyway, so in with a real chance for a place on the shortlist. One of our best-sellers in the shop so reckon it'll have some supporters from the 'Loo.

M.J. Hyland 'Carry Me Down' (Canongate) - I was put off this one because the cover looks just like The Kite Runner, and The Kite Runner was one of my most hated books of 2004 or whenever... Remember kids: always judge a book by its cover.

Howard Jacobson 'Kalooki Nights' (Jonathan Cape) - heralded as a work of genius by C&P favourite AC Grayling and who am I to argue with that?

James Lasdun 'Seven Lies' (Jonathan Cape) - We heart James Lasdun at C&P. Shortlist please.

Mary Lawson 'The Other Side of the Bridge' (Chatto & Windus) - Another unknown quantity for me...

Jon McGregor 'So Many Ways to Begin' (Bloomsbury) - This'll be one of those situations where if it wins it'll actually be for the first novel, like Al Pacino's Oscar for 'Scent of a Woman'. Woo-hah!

Hisham Matar 'In the Country of Men' (Viking) - I read the first couple of pages of this and thought, yawn, The Kite Runner again. So another one with a chance at winning then...

Claire Messud 'The Emperor’s Children' (Picador) - pass

David Mitchell 'Black Swan Green' (Sceptre) - I'm a Mitchell fan, in fact am reading Cloud Atlas at the moment (always a beat behind) and I heard some of this on Radio 4. It sounded brilliant and quite a departure in style for him from what I understand, so I'd like to see it do well. Matthew on the other hand assures me that Mitchell is dull and derivative and hyped far beyond his abilities, which is the kind of thing that always goes over my head. I just like his books. Sorry.

Naeem Murr 'The Perfect Man' (William Heinemann) - don't...

Andrew O'Hagan 'Be Near Me' (Faber & Faber) - know much...

James Robertson 'The Testament of Gideon Mack' (Hamish Hamilton) - about these...

Edward St Aubyn 'Mother’s Milk' (Picador) - and this one had a terrible cover.

Barry Unsworth 'The Ruby in her Navel' (Hamish Hamilton) - big name, horrible title

Sarah Waters 'The Night Watch' (Virago) - And last but not certainly least! The absolute number one choice from C&P and I speak for all of us here (without, you know, having checked with the boys or anything), because we *heart* Sarah Waters, she is local, she shops in our shop, this was our first ever book of the month, she invited us to the launch party and everything, and I drank loads and ate all the canapes so I owe her, and we just love her, LOVE her. Waters to win! Go Sarah! Not least because it's about time the winner's speech was sweet and modest and not a pompous heap of horseshit, not mentioning any names but I think we all know the culprits...


Of course, half the fun of Booker time is complaining about what's been left off. So just to get that argument started: where, please, is Remainder by Tom McCarthy?

Hiccup Down Babylon - The Further Exploits of the Recently Arrived One Known As Finn

Finn woke up with a start. Things were not cool. Despite the small size and relative lack of sophistication in our young hero's brain he had finally worked it out. The world was not all fluffy and full of smiley people like mum (and sometimes dad) there was bad stuff too. Really bad stuff. Stuff that was so terrible he felt like crying right about now.

So he did.

A while later, as dad collapsed frazzled onto the sofa, groaning and tearing out the remains of his thinning hair, Finn resolved to SORT IT.

A quick suck on the thumb (Legend has it Finn once burned his thumb on the recently removed from the fire body of the Salmon of Knowledge and now thumb sucking resulted in future seeing etc) provided a solution to the problem of evil in the world.

Hiccups.

Lots of hiccups.

A short while later he began:

Dark Satanic Mills were destroyed in a flurry of mouth flatulence to be replaced with idyllic workers co-operatives like Crockatt & Powell. (!)

Nasty words between lovers were mangled and returned as whispered sweet nothings.

Death had his cloak pinched and sythe blunted - but then returned as all good necronaughts know - Death is a part of Life.

Bombs became buns, missiles meringues, soldiers students and tanks turned into trees.

After an hour or two the world was a better place.

Finn woke up with a start.

Saturday Superstore

David Byrne

Ex Talking Head David Byrne has a great website. He compiles a monthly playlist that you can listen to on his site or at iTunes. And it just gets better and better every month. This month is a list of artists from his old record label. Last month was Standards and before that Electronica, country music, Cuban oldies and many more. Perfect saturday afternoon listening.

Prizes and Lists

A commenter invited us a few posts back to compile what we thought would be a 15 title Booker Long list. There are a few reasons why we're not.

a) Personally, I'm not much of a list-maker. I must be one of the few men I know who have never alphabetised their record collection or library and I'm not much of a one for top 10's, 50 greatest, 100 countdown either. I've never really liked shelving too as I'm sure Matthew and Marie will have noticed - I kind of like 'ordered randomness', whatever that means.

b) I'm just not sure how you can turn literature into a hierarchy. Of course I believe in good and bad but every good book is so different from the next you can only discuss them on their own merits. You can compare and contrast but to place them in order seems somehow Romantic as opposed to Enlightened. I'm the latter, mostly.

c) At places like Waterstones it is imperative for them to have the same books front of house at every store. It doesn't make commercial sense for us to have the same 15 titles at the front of our shop as you see in Waterstones and the others. We'll look at the list, see what we like and stock what we think will be complimentary to our selection.

And d) We could run a C&P alternative Booker prize. It might be a bit of a laugh but I just don't think our customers would really care. Also see a) and b) above. The longlist is primarily a sales boost for Publishers much in the same way Valentine's Day is for card people. That's fine, everyone wants to make a bit of money but I think our punters expect a little more from us by now.

I might get into trouble for this

I read on Susan Hill's blog that she would never want to run a second hand bookshop. I too am having increasing difficulties with this part of the trade. Primarily any book sold from a secondhand shop or from the Amazon market place or Ebay that is still In Print means the author doesn't receive a royalty from that sale. That seems unfair. Considering authors make so little money anyway it seems really unfair. Maybe if 2nd hand dealers paid a kind of Author Tax so funds could be distributed to authors then maybe...

So, maybe secondhand places are good for Out of Print stuff. Unfortunately, for me this just points out the paucity of our libraries. If, when you are finished with a book and you don't want to keep it and it is out of print shouldn't there be a national network of libraries where that book can find a home and live on being borrowed? And shouldn't Out of Print stuff just be put on the Internet? Sorry, dodgy ground here.

Antiquarian? Again libraries. Oh dear, I don't really want to put second hand book dealers out of business. Honest.

But also, we get quite a few customers who are dedicated 2nd hand buyers. They ask us if we only sell new books and then leave in a cloud of contempt when we say yes. Sorry people but for a book to be second-hand someone has to have bought it new at sometime! You need us!

Last two books sold

Both to young twenty-something regulars. Madame Bovary to the very attractive woman and Philosophy Principles and Problems by Roger Scruton to the scruffy student bloke. Neither seemed to quibble at paying the cover price. Makes me come over all elitist and snobby. This is a good thing.

A message for Jonathan

We got the Banksy book in. Put it in the window. Of course it sold immediately. Mea Culpa Jon. Mea Culpa Matthew

Remainder - The Future?

Great to see Tom McCarthy's excellent Remainder starting to receive the review coverage it richly deserves. (Guardian today)

Turned down by all the main publishers who failed to see any similarity to the pillars of our modern literary world (Wayne Rooney, Jordan, Billy Piper and Dan Brown) it has taken a long while for word of mouth to push Remainder into the limelight.

Perhaps in the future we might see an increasingly close relationship between independent bookshops and independent publishers with the common aim of making sure quirky, interesting and downright weird books still find an outlet?

Since opening 8 months ago we have already forged strong links with Eland Books, Serif, Pushkin Press, Maia, Portobello Books, Alma Books, Hearing Eye, Marion Boyars and Melville House Press to name a few...

Maybe it's already happening? Want something a little different? We're on Lower Marsh, Waterloo.

Mostly Books

Mark from Mostly Books came in to see us today - bearing gifts! (For Finn)

He and his wife Nicki have been going for just over a month...

I am constantly and regularly astounded by how bloody brilliant people in the booktrade are.

If you live anywhere remotely near Oxford check them out - in Abingdon.

www.mostly-books.co.uk

All the best, lots of luck and remember guys - KEEP IT HARDCORE

In Vogue

Kate Moss and Crockatt & Powell...What's the connection?

Rock star boyfriends?

Cocaine problems?

Nope - both in Vogue!

No I'm serious...We are in Vogue this month. Yup, among the pages and pages and pages and pages and pages and pages and pages of adverts you will (if you part with £3.60 for the opportunity to be advertised at in a "shock and awe" style) find a brief mention of our fledgling enterprise.

P121:

Headed - Boutique Bookshops

In a world of overwhelming choice, we all need a little editing. From the food we eat to the clothes we buy, it makes all the difference to know that care has gone into the selection process. It is no surprise that independently run boutique bookshops are currently enjoying a quiet renaissance. While the battle of the high-street giants rages, and it's revealed just how much publishers will pay to make their title a "bestseller", more and more of us are discovering the pleasures of real bookshops, where books are curated with the same care as artworks in a gallery.

Good stuff eh? (Thanks to the peeps at Vogue - hope it's ok to quote this...)

Haywood Hill is described as "wonderfullyramshacklee" John Sandoe as "Dickensian", Daunt in Marylebone as "elegant".

As for Crockatt & Powell:

Matthew Crockatt and Adam Powell also spotted a gap in the market , and launched Crockatt & Powell in Waterloo this year. They quickly started a monthly bookgroup, a poetry parlour and regular readings, where philosophy professor AC Grayling and Zadie Smith have taken the stand. Their passion is clear. "We stock the books we love," says Powell simply. "And anything that appeals to shameless elitist literary snobs", adds Crockatt, wryly.

So there you go. The die is cast. Waterloo is to be the new Chelsea and Lower Marsh a 21st century Kings Road.

Or something...

It was a dark and stormy night... and other tuesday morning randomness.

New Releases

'Miniscule blue flowers cascaded down the bleached ancient stones of the wall. By its foot, a fluorescence of apricots and a worn runnel of clear flowing water, lent an air of delight and abundance to the garden...

She shifted petulantly under the parasol and sipped her glass of rough red paraffino. "I know zay dumped ze veppons overboard before ze vorship clohsed, but viz all ze rardars and sattaleets today, it is too easy to votch sheeps."'

Intrigued? The Suppliant by Peter Morris, Saxum Books, 0955304105, £11. Available now at C&P

New Blog

Scott Pack has a new blog to go with his shiny new job. I'll get Marie to add it the roll of honour when she comes back.

Professionalism, Maturity and blogging

There are so many angle that blogs take. Ranting, professional, political, sentimental, angry, stoopid, widely read, hardly read. Some have agendas, some don't. I particularly liked this response from Mil Millington in an interview on this blog

As a former professional IT guy who has harnessed the beastly power of the web to get his writing known, do you have plans to employ other technologies to air your writing, such as a podcast?

Well, as I say, I didn't mean to. I was simply amusing myself - I didn't think anyone else would take any notice. And then, when they did, I still didn't regard it as a career opportunity or anything so... so... so American. As an aside, I get lots of email offering to increase the traffic to my site, in various ways. I have no interest in increasing the traffic to my site - why would I? I have a bicycle. I got it from Halfords for about £100, in a sale. I've put a reasonable amount of care and effort into making sure it's a good bicycle - I've changed the saddle, done things to the tyres and so on - and that it works well. If people see my bicycle as I go by, and take a look at it, and like it, that's fine. If they actually call out, 'Hey - like your bike! I'm pleased I saw it,' then that's nice, I suppose. However, why on earth would I feel the desire to have my bicycle seen by every person it was possible to gather round? It's my bicycle. I have it because I like riding it (and I don't have a car); I don't have it because I want people to know I have it, and gaze at it longingly.

Which is sort of the attitude I have to our blog. After a comment on a post of mine yesterday I was wondering what this blog should be about but then I remembered that C&P is an enterprise owned and run by two thirty-something, middle class layabouts who didn't like being told what to do and either couldn't be arsed or were incapable of getting a real job. (I haven't forgotten Marie. She has her own special place here and in our hearts!) Of course we take our business seriously as it's our livelihood but our inner teenagers have to escape somewhere and voila! Blogland! So in the spirit of our own C&P approach to cyberspace if you've got any pissy, condescending comments - just keep them to yourselves. Thank you.

However

The marvelous Susan Hill has added us to her blog roll. I suddenly feel an urge to grow up and take things a bit more seriously... Maybe tomorrow.

Meeeeow! or Pot, Kettle, Black.

http://forums.booktrade.info/booktrade.php?&do=news&bit=All&newsitem=8522

Obviously, Waterstone's got to Ottakers in the nick of time! They were so doooomed before the real deal came along.

('Dead' Stock is books that cannot be returned to the publisher. A bookseller can return books to the publisher between 3 and 12 months of the last invoice for that item. Anything past this is 'Dead', it eats up valuable shelf space that could be used for books that shift units and it also eats up your cashflow - generally the idea in bookselling is to sell the book a few times before you have to pay for the first copy. This, generally, never really happens.

Still, 5%!!!! I've worked in shops where the dead stock was pushing 40%! I could go into our nearest Waterstone's at Trafalgar Square and within the hour point out 10% worth of dead stock and 40% of overstocking. How bloody cheeky are they.

Actually, this kind of hubris makes me jolly annoyed indeed. A curse on all their houses)

Top Tens

Our top ten sellers at the minute are:

1: On Beauty by Zadie Smith
2: Secret Life of Trees by Colin Tudge
3: Journey by Moonlight by Antal Szerb
4: Pendragon Legend by Antal Szerb
5: The Owl and the Pussycat (Board book)
6: A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian by Marina Lewycka
7: Time Will Darken It by William Maxwell
8: The Terracotta Dog by Andrea Camilleri
9: My Life by Anton Chekhov (Melville Press Edition)
10: Remainder by Tom McCarthy

Amazon have:

1: Artemis Fowl and the Lost Colony
2: Gordon Ramsay's Sunday Lunch
3: The Dangerous Book For Boys
4: The Island by Victoria Hislop
5: The Abortionist's Daughter
6: The Time Traveller's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
7: The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova
8: My Best Friend's Girl by Dorothy Koomson
9: Marley and Me by John Grogan
10: Positively Happy by Noel Edmonds

The "Official" Bookseller Top 10

1: The Island by Victoria Hislop
2: The Righteous Men by Sam Bourne
3: My Best Friend's Girl by Dorothy Koomson
4: On Beauty by Zadie Smith
5: Not That Kind of Girl by Catherine Alliott
6: Lifeguard by Patterson and Gross
7: If You Could See Me Now by Celia Ahern
8: Angel by Katie Price
9: I Know You Got Soul by Jeremy Clarkson
10: Making Your Mind Up by Jill Mansell

As you can see our bestsellers are a little different from most other shops.

Either we are an interesting little shop that caters to a group of people who think "outside the box" or we are doomed to miserable failure...

Hot Reads

I am very much enjoying this debate on the Guardian's Culture Vulture blog: which books are sexy and which are not?

I don't think I'd actually try to get off with someone based solely on their reading matter but I do tend to make judgements after the event, based on what books they have lying around the place. Years ago, I was delighted to catch sight, by the bedside of my new love interest, of a volume of Terry Eagleton literary criticism. At last, a thinker! Much joy ensued. Some time and much literary discussion later, I realised that his enthusiasm for arch-mysogynist Philip Roth was a definite sign that there was no future in it. (God I LOATHE "America's Greatest Living Writer" Philip Roth.) When I mentioned that Roth hates women, and he just looked baffled... Well. Farewell.

More bizarrely, I was dumped not once but twice in incidents directly related to Haruki Murukami's South of the Border, West of the Sun. Inexplicable. They read it; it was curtains. I went to a talk given by Murakami shortly after dumping number 2 (indeed, at the suggestion of the dumper, to whom I had foolishly lent the book in the first place - no future lover of mine will *ever* get his mitts on it) and intended to ask the author (a) why this had befallen me and (b) what he was going to do about it, but sadly, from my seat of row Z number 2 (and there were only two seats in row Z) I was unable to get the attention of the chair of the discussion - one Scott Pack, the Artist Formerly Known As Evil. So my question went unanswered. The nice Japanese-speaking gay man in the other half of row Z, however, did dispense the following invaluable piece of wisdom: "If you go out with Murukami men, you get dumped in Murukami ways." Sage...

In short, while it's true that reading might be sexy, it very much depends on what you read. Still, there's one thing to be said for compatible reading habits: at least you know you'll have something to talk about when you finally get bored of having sex.

From the mouths of babes...

I just had the economy explained to me by a six-year-old.

He came in, said hello, and then sat down and read Harry and the Bucketful of Dinosaurs.

You have very good books, he said when he had finished. Where do you get them from?

We get them from the people who make them, I said.

So the money is recycled, said the boy. You buy the books and you have to pay for them. Then you sell the books. You can take the money from the books and spend it on more books, or you can spend it on your house. If you spend it on your house then the people you buy from can buy books. So the money is recycled.

Um... that's right, I said.

Do you have any more Harry and the Dinosaurs books? he said.

Skylines

Something was troubling me on my recent trip to Belgium. Ouside of Brussels every town or city I visited or passed on a train had one disturbing feature that I had never picked up on in this country even though it is a more than common occurence. Without fail the tallest structure in every place, the highest most dominant feature of the skyline was over 400 years old. At no point in the subsequent 400 years had any of the townspeople sought to compete or to exceed the accomplishments of their medieval or renaissance predecessors by building higher or bigger. And then I realised that of all the cities in the world I have found home all of them have superceeded their historical roots. You may not like glass and steel but to me it signifies engagement and technology and desire and excitement. I may appreciate Bruges or Salisbury or Rome even but I would never want to live in them. Their stifling reverence of the past or their lack of ambition would suffocate me. I guess that's why I live in London - pockets of the past and frighteningly modern at the same time it feels like a real living breathing city. One of our highest points is a ferris wheel - how cool is that?

I think there might be a book in this. Mmm. I can feel a list coming on too. British towns and cities where the highest point is from a building or structure pre 1901. Any takers? Or is there a website that lists the highest buildings in each town? There must be.

Finn establishes the difference between day and night despite confusing signals from the adult and mechanical world...

After almost three weeks in the world certain things were becoming clear to Finn:

1: Though named after a giant he was, if truth be told, rather on the small side.

2: Mum was great.

3: Dad was daft.

The fourth thing that Finn felt close to understanding involved certain changes, cyclical in their nature, that could be observed in any 24 hour period.

During the day an orb of fire blazed away making the beans wilt and mum fret.

At night a paler, cooler, sphere hung in the sky that, though less energetic, appeared to Finn to be a benevolent friend.

There were more subtle differences. During the day dad wasn't quite so daft. With a good shot of coffee in the morning pops could be quite articulate. At night daft dad tried to put nappies on upside down. He tended to sway and stumble and groan.

Similarly mum was more grumpy at night. She seemed less eager to feed Finn, slower and more bumbly.

These differences Finn had noticed despite the best efforts of the adult and mechanical world to confuse him. For example daft dad had a habit of singing (badly) to Finn the following song:

Night and day
You are the one
Only you beneath the moon
And under the sun

Whether near to me or far
It's no matter darling where you are
I think of you
Night and day

This suggested there was no difference between night and day BUT THERE WAS.

Then there were the feeble, mechanical lights, that tried to imitate the sun as they dangled from the ceiling. It could be night BUT STILL LIGHT. There was something wrong there and certainly potential for confusion for one whose brain was as yet only partially developed.

Showing signs of his future heroic status Finn stood by his careful observations and decided that yes there WAS a difference between night and day.

Sooner or later he would change his behaviour and do as mum and dad clearly wished - sleep at night and play by day. But he felt it was important to establish who was boss. He would let them sweat and groan a while longer.

After all, he liked to wander in the dark at night with dad in the garden, even if it meant listening to more nonsensical songs!

ok ok ok ok ok ok ok ok ok ok here he is...

FINN

Thanks to Toe -B for the snazzy Dylan suit...

A lovely moment in an otherwise hot and sweaty day...

A lovely lady wants a ticket for Zadie - but we've sold out. Bummer.

Then she buys two of our lovely Melville press novellas and says we have just become her favourite bookshop.

She lives in New York (bummer) but also said we were better than all the indi shops she knows in New York too!

WOW!

It's SO NICE when we meet people that really GET what we're trying to do.

Read this and get angry

Elif Shafak, the Turkish feminist author - and not only one of C&P's biggest sellers, but also an incredibly nice, gracious woman who gave one of the best talks we've ever had here - is the latest in a long line of writers to be put on trial for 'insulting Turkishness'. It's not even her who's done the insulting - it's a fictional character in one of her novels. But that, it seems, is enough. If convicted, Shafak, who is six months pregnant, faces up to three years in jail.

Read more about it here. Then start writing angry letters.

As the song said "There ain't no tits on the radio" - There are now!

Yes, Crockatt & Powell will be cominatcha over the FM airwaves on Thursday, thanks to Resonance FM 104.4

We have an slot from 7-8pm and we'll be playing recordings of a couple of our events.

If lots of people listen it may become a regular slot so tune in loyal peeps.

Hear the HUGELY talented Pete Hobbs reading from The Short Day Dying and I could Ride All Day In My Cool Blue Train then be grilled (nicely) by our very own Marie.

After that we have Segun Afolabi and Tony D'Souza reading from and talking about their books A Life Elsewhere and Whiteman, once again our Marie keeps them in line as stereotypes about Africa are destroyed by our valiant authors...

I have, in true budget radio style, agreed to MC the show so if you want to send a shout out to any of yer mates call me on 04774 333 973.

ThisreadinggoesouttothemanliketheColindowninHackney - sound mate! You're bonkers you are Geeze!

(That last bit was a joke - the rest is true!)

Grown men do cry.

Anyone who just watched Tiger Woods win the open and not shed a tear is indeed a heartless son of a bitch.

(ps A Guilty Secret: I love golf. I don't play much and i despise it's middleclass status but when you're on the course and you strike a 7 iron off the fairway cleanly there is almost no better feeling.)

And, as an aside, the term 'Links' Golf refers to the land between the sea and arible land that was useless to everybody. So, democratically, it was decided to use this waste land as a game knocking a tiny ball around trying to find a hole. Golf is a product of the Scottish Enlightenment and should be revered as such. That it has been taken over by executives is a diminishment of its noble origins. But, Tiger wins and more and more people are interested in the game. Let's wrest the control of this marvelous sport from the pringle-wearing nazis and return it to the true faithful who love it for what it is...

Keep The Ampersand Flying

Seeing as we seem to be talking more about films than books at the moment, I watched the adaptation of Orwell's Keep The Aspidistra Flying last night, a really fun film starring a poignantly fresh-faced Richard E Grant and the enduringly beautiful Helena Bonham Carter. It's quite hard to tell that it's Orwell if you don't know, as it's light and funny and sexy, and nobody is tortured by a fascist regime and there are no pigs in it. The only real clue is the cheerful deconstruction of the British class system, and of course the notion that there are far too many potted plants in this world (cf the famous spider plant at the door to Room 101.) It was a lovely way to pass an hour and a half, but really I mention it because the climax of the film involves Grant, as aspiring poet Gordon Comstock, hitting the absolute bottom rung of social degredation, and his girlfriend and sister having to come and rescue him before he degenerates into a stagnant pool of filth and proletarianism. Said bottom rung? Working in a bookshop in Lambeth. "I couldn't possibly go there by myself," says a horrified Bonham-Carter as the long-suffering girlfriend. "Even the tomcats walk in pairs." Still, at least Comstock appears to enjoy working in the shop. All he does all day is read the paper, eat crisps, drink tea with the neighbours and flirt with the customers. I was going to say that things have changed a lot since then - you no longer need a police escort to get safely through SE1 - but now that I think of it, maybe it's more of a case of plus ca change...

Finn and the Quest for Quality Coffee in Camberwell

Dawn came with rosy fingers then scarpered sharpish in the face of a couple of almighty farts from our diminutive darling - Finn.

Daft daddy had also been awakened by Finn's digestive disaster and began to help with the morning ablutions. Unfortunately the large but foolish one was not really a morning person. It had taken a mere 13 days in the world for this to become clear and now, as the big berk tried to push Finn's head through a hole that was clearly designed for an arm, Finn resolved to take action. Coffee - that's what they needed.

A short while later they were off, Finn directing the giant fool with a series of relaxed grunts and snorts, towards the shops in Camberwell Green.

Everything would have been cool if daft dad could be persuaded to drink instant coffee but sadly his taste in beverages was as particular/peculiar as his taste in books. It had to be quality coffee, ideally picked by happy organic farmers and fairly traded too. But this was Camberwell the town that boasted not only a huge £1 shop but also an even larger 99p store. Quality anything was hard to come by.

The newsagent was pleased to meet Finn. She had a paper but no quality coffee.

Next they tried Mr Cruzon's fruit and veg shop. Finn loved Mr Cruzon whose favoritee things were small cats and caramel flavored yoghurt. After fighting through a gaggle of cooing strangers, all of whom exhibited symptoms of mental illness of various levels of severity, they found the coffee.

There were two kinds of Greek coffee, Polish coffee, Palestinian coffee with chicory in it or Douwe Egberts which was the closest thing to quality coffee they were likely to find within a mile of the green. But Douwe Egberts was a large corporate brand and Dumb Dad liked small things - probably explaining his ridiculous attempt to make a living by running an independent bookshop.

So Egberts was off the list. One of Mr Cruzon's friends began to explain how to make Greek coffee using gestures, Greek and random English words. The large but foolish one, still smothered in a pre-coffee fog, nodded and said things like "Ah I see" while clearly not taking any of the explanation in.

Eventually they left having also purchased a melon for mum who was snoozing at home. She always seemed tired though Finn couldn't understand why...

To cut a rather long story short dad managed to make Greek coffee in a pan and woke up enough to read the paper in the garden with Finn. As he put the Middle East crisis into context for our tiny titan we can pause to reflect:

If children are the future but adults act like children - will there be a future for Finn and all the other little things?

Back to my roots

I honestly can't remember the last time I felt such sheer visceral delirious enjoyment of a book as Hollywood Animal by Joe Eszterhas. It's nearly 800 pages but I've gone through it in a few days and I'm a slowwwwww reader. Eszterhas is a screenwriter responsible for such gems as Flashdance, Jagged Edge, Music Box (actually a great movie), Basic Instinct and erm, Showgirls. The book is by turns egotistical, mawkish, insulting, funny, gossipy, libelous, moving and powerful. Not what you'd expect at all looking at the cover.

I remember the first time my dad offered to take me to the 'pictures' when I was 5. All I could imagine was a big white room with empty, gilded picture frames on the walls and I didn't want to go. But we went anyway and saw Esacpe to Witch Mountain and that was it - my love affair with movies began. In the following years it was Star Wars (boring), Close Encounters (Mind-blowing), Alien (I didn't actually go but my pops came home and relayed in all its glorious, gory detail the stomach-exploding scene) and ET (A bit soft but I remember standing in the queue and dad asking loudly what I thought ET stood for - The Extra TESTICLE, ha ha. I was embarrassed). As a teenager through to my early twenties I secretly wanted to be a director. When I read a book I saw it as a film. I still believe my as yet unmade The Idiot by Dostoevsky would have been one of the greatest films ever. But it was only after I started to read about hollywood and it's machinations and the type of person you had to be to make it I realised with sadness but some relief that the directors life was not to be. I returned to my other great love - making stuff. (How did I ever end up a bookseller?)

Anyway, still given the choice between a film I want to see and a book I want to read the movie always come first (how DID I become a bookseller?). It's no wonder I really love the Eszterhas book - it's the best of both my worlds.

ps Reading my last few posts I think I need a break. I'm off to Brussels for 4 days on monday. This time I really will be going to the Pictures - the Breughel room in the gallery and I shall try and find some peace and humility.

lord.rings.whatever.

Warning: This post contains very strong language. Please don't complain about it.

Disclaimer: I've only ever read the first 12 pages of Lord of the Rings before becoming so bored I wanted to chew my fingers off. The following is based upon my viewing of the final installment of the film franchise seen tonight on the usually reliable sky movies.

So... we want to re-establish the dominion of men after the all powerful and all evil control of the lord Sauron - the big eye in the sky - or as we all really know it as, that giant flaming cunt. Let's face it, it's not an eye, the source of all evil according to Tolkien and the world of men is a huge, all-seeing engorged vagina. An all powerful cunt, forever distant atop a towering yet blackened phallus, a phallus never quite allowed to touch the almighty power of the all-seeing cunt. And who does this world of men send to defeat the vagina - tiny men. Tiny, midget, hairy hobbits. And what do they need to defeat this cunt - A Ring. The symbol of marriage, partnership, domesticity and the vagina's control of men. To destroy the cunt tiny, yet strong, men must toss this ring into the fires of Doom. To destroy the power of the engorged vagina midgets must travel to Doom, melt the ring and recover the kingdom of men. Mmmm. (These tiny men have huge feet. You know what they say about the size of a mans foot)

But it's the arbitrariness of fantasy fiction I can't take either. Faced with an enemy (of a black, let's not go down the race track... evil army) when required the good white men can summon an army of ghosts. Erm... where'd they come from? And then a fleet of giant eagles appear just when you need them. And of course you've always got the pointy-eared elves to help out. And those darky orcs seem to die pretty darn easy too.

LOTR was voted britains favourite book recently. It's not mine. I fucking can't stand it.

I Want My MTV

The modern beat combo Dirty Pretty Things are filming their latest pop video outside the shop. I hope they hurry up as they're scaring away customers with their drug-addled rock star behaviour!

Here begins a chronicle and account of the legendary exploits of the small but mighty bean known throughout the land as Finn...

One morning Finn awoke and knew his kin, the beans, were in danger. Snoozing the evening before he had a vision of Suzanne Charlton pointing to some numbers and then whilst asleep the sun had blazed brightly in his dreams.

Those little orange flowers that one day, with care and water and not too much sun, would become good green beans were doomed to be frazzled without swift intervention from their protector Finn.

But how could our tiny hero reach them? The beans grew in a far away land at the bottom of the garden. The grassy plains were wide and full of insects. The jealous and potentially vicious cat lurked in the bushes. He was sure to take any opportunity to dispatch his newborn rival. Despite being a legendary hero famed throughout the land as a mighty warrior Finn was finding it hard to hold his own head steady on his shoulders. (In fact the most heroic exploit so far achieved by the tiny titan was rather embarrassing. Finn could wee on his own head! But that was no help to anyone.)

But where strength fails, wit prevails!

Bawling at the top of his little lungs Finn summoned the tired and sluggish giant - dad. He yelled on as the dimbo went through the usual routine designed to settle Finn - nappy, burping etc.

Finally, as Finn knew he would, daft daddy strapped our hero onto his chest and opened the back door. It was cool outside but already the first rays of sun were shining on the vegetable patch.

"I think we'll water those beans" said the big fool and off they set, watering can in hand (there was a ban on), flying over the grassy plains high above the p'd off cat to water veg for all mankind.

Here ye how the poets tell of the day Finn saved the beans by use of his wit and guile!

And they all ate fresh garden produce happily ever after...

Oh crap.

I just went to update our website and it appears my computer has had a nervous breakdown and lost all the web files. Bugger.

Neologism

Zidane (zih-dahn) noun 1 An act of random madness 2 A particularly satisfying legal term denoting justice 3 An uncommonly elegant person 4 Revenge verb 1 To perform an act of random madness 2 To take revenge 3 To seek justice 4 To suavely flaneur down the street
- PHRASES n 1 That was a real Zidane 2 Zidane is served 3 Phwooar look at that Zidane over there 4 Zidane is a dish best served cold v 1 That blokes gonna f***ing Zidane him if he's not careful 2 'And so Monte Cristo had finally zidaned Monsieur le Comte' 3 Mr Jeffrey Archer: M'lud, I only seek to zidane myself against these heinous accusations 4 She was zidaneing across the boulevard in the most beautiful Chanel suit.

I Heart Buses

8.20am. The 468 is at a bus stop taking on passengers. A tiny schoolchild with a huge, heavy backpack is running for his life up the road in front of the bus trying to catch the drivers eye. Just as he gets to the doors the bus pulls off without him. Nice. I felt a 'Zidane' moment coming on...

(When I was a kid I had my own classroom with my own desk where I could leave all my books. In a lot of schools these days kids don't have the same luxury. They have to carry all their stuff with them in those oversized backpacks like little academic nomads)

Note to Ken: Trams please!

Welcome to our world.

Hello there young baby crockatt! Looking forward to making your aquaintance.

It's at times like these when we turn our thoughts to all the good things in life, all the joys and miracles and all the things we can teach young Finn as he finds his way in this crazy world.

We have to teach him of the kindness of people, of generosity and spirit. We have to let him know that depite all the horrors Finn will see as he grows up that we are basically good and that love will prevail. With one important exception...

When being abused by a 6ft 5in eye-tie defender it is perfectly acceptable to headbutt him in the chest as hard as you possibly can. Yes! Get in there my son! Zizou, c'est magnifique!

(I think I might be alone in my admiration for Zidane's extraordinary act of violence but to me it wasn't the petulant act of a dilettante Rooney but the result of 20 years of abuse, much of it rascist. It was the last act of defiance of an extraordinary career. Not for Zidane the pathetic ignominy of defeat on penalties and a quiet sloping off into the Berlin night. No, he'd had enough and he wasn't going to take it anymore. There's more psychology and drama in this one moment than in any number of world cups.)

Sorry Finn, don't listen to me, I'm a bad person. Listen to your Mum and Dad, they're much nicer.

Once again, welcome to our world.

It's a Boy!

Mother and baby and Dad all said to be doing fine. We haven't heard from Matthew what they're calling him yet, so there's still time to place your bets. Mine's for 'Fyodor'...

How did that happen?

We've got a couple of events coming up in the shop in July. The week after next Perrier Award-winning comedian Daniel Kitson is doing 3 nights as a warm up before taking his new show to Edinburgh and then the week after we've got an evening with recent Orange winner Zadie Smith (who doesn't usually do this sort of thing).

We don't actually know any famous people (actually I bet Marie does) but I guess we know people (customers) who know famous people. I s'pose it helps being in central London too. Anyway, as you can imagine we're quietly chuffed and looking forward to it all so many thanks to those who made it possible.

Oh, and Matthew's wife went into labour today. Crockatt & Powell & Sons (or Daughters)

Honestly, you turn your back for a minute... How did that happen!

Litro

A while back this bloke came in talking about a plan he had to publish an A4 sheet once a week that had a short story on it. These stories would be sent in by the public. The sheet was to be called Litro and would be distributed to folk at tube stations.

We had a lot of nutters through the doors in the early days.

But this chap is a cut above...

Check this out.