This one's for free

Do you ever have those drunken conversations where you pitch tv shows you'd like to see?

'StarDates'

12 boys. 12 girls. All signs of the Zodiac, natch. Audience chooses one of each after some kind of talent show. One of them gets paired off with their ideal star sign partner, the other with the worst possible astrological match. They come back next week and much enjoyment is had.

How would this not work?

Last night we were pitching great websites we'd like to see. I think we've come up with a banker. But I'm not telling you lot. This time next year, we'll be millionaires.

It's like the opposite of MySpace.

What fresh hell is this?

Do they really know what they're letting themselves in for?

I was only 23 minutes late

It would appear my alarm clock only tries to wake me up for an hour before the snooze button goes back to, um, snoozing.

Good reason though.

Great launch party for Catherine O'Flynn's What Was Lost. Lots of lovely people from somewhere outside the M25 and, we think, a good time had by all.

But I'll leave Matthew to post. I think he may have more things to say as I have to go and clear away a few wine bottles.

Only the second time in 14 months I've opened up late. That has to be good, doesn't it?

Populations

Matthew and I's old boss is opening a new bookshop in Bath, a town of 160,000 that already carries 2 independents and a big Waterstone's.

The London borough of Lambeth numbers some 260,000 souls and has, erm... us, a book warehouse and an indie on Clapham High Street.

There must be some untapped market potential there somewhere. Don't ya thunk?

Coffee + Great Book = Bookselling Mania

Ok, if you only buy one book today it has to be What Was Lost...

You want a travel guide to Prague? Why? Are you out of your mind? Going to Prague? Cancel the trip. It means nothing.

Read this book!

Hello mate, you need to read this book!

You are the police?

So what - read the fuc*ing...

adam - I have been arres

What Was Lost by Catherine O'Flynn

We have an event on Monday night, the London launch of Catherine O'Flynn's debut novel What Was Lost.

There's been plenty of review coverage already, all glowing, and the publisher Tindal Street Press have a good track record. (Remember Astonishing Splashes of Colour by Clare Morrall - Booker shortlisted a few years back? That was Tindal Street)

I started reading the book yesterday afternoon and I can't bloody put the thing down.

How many times do you read about "astonishing debuts"? Yeah, you don't have to tell me I know. Jaded is my middle name when it comes to publisher blurbs. But...

THIS IS AN ASTONISHING DEBUT.

It's brilliant.

If I were you I'd get down to Crockatt & Powell for 7pm on Monday. Not only will you get to hear Catherine read you can also get her to sign a copy for your collection (after she wins a few prizes these babies will be like gold dust) you can also buy one for yourself and if you have any friends buy copies for them too - it's one of those books.

An exciting book.

An astonishing debut...

Not. Getting. Any. Work. Done

I've been switching it on and off for 45 minutes and I just cannot stop...

A True Story...

We have a lovely little book/pamphlet in at the minute called One Eye Grey. It's an homage to the Penny Dreadful and is just perfect for the nether regions of Waterloo.

A bloke walked in the other day and asked for a copy. We sold him one and had a brief chat.

"You're up against it I suppose. I mean look at that" he said, pointing to a copy of Sarah Water's The Night Watch. "You can get that for half price in Waterstone's at the minute."

What can you say to that? Nada.

"Those are signed though, Sarah's great...lives locally..." he was out the door.

Oh well.

Next day he's back.

"Can I get one of those signed copies of the Night Watch now?"

Of course we only have one copy left. It's in the window and it's not signed.

"We do sell books from time to time you know" I say.

"Yeah, I suppose you do" he says. "I'll take it anyway, even though it's not signed."

I raise my eyebrows.

"Well I went back to Waterstone's. I asked if they had it and they said "Yeah it's upstairs" I just thought to myself, you know what? I don't want to buy it from you lot, I'm going to go back to that little shop where I got the penny dreadful - so here I am."

I smiled the gormless smile that I save for joyous occasions. And then we had a great chat about hidden London, Iain Sinclair, Psychogeography, dispatch riding...

Why shop at an independent when you could save money shopping at Waterstone's or on Amazon?

Why indeed...

BTW plenty of signed copies of the Night Watch in stock now. Thanks Sarah!

A very boring cycling post

I bought myself a cycle computer for my birthday. The information I gleaned this morning is:

• I reached 34.4mph going down Latchmere Rd.
• Battersea Park is 0.6 miles long.
• The 'long' route I take in to work is 9 miles exactly.
• The 'short' route home is 3.8 miles.
• I got to 24.7mph on the flat along Millbank.
• I have traveled 25 miles since fixing the thing to my bike.
• At 6.3 miles, the constituent parts of my left knee felt like they were about to disassemble in an excrutiating rupture of bone and cartilage.
• At 6.6 miles those same parts miraculously and thankfully, painlessly reassembled themselves into something approximating working order.

ps Matthew has insisted I work the morning shift tomorrow which means, if the weather man is to be believed, cycling through a driving 4" of snow on my skinny, slick tyres. I think he wants to collect on the insurance...

Marie's Book is Very Good Looking

Our one and only ampersand called in today to show us the cover of her book.

We put it on display with a whole bunch of other new titles and it stood out from the crowd.

Brilliantly written, sexy, funny - and good looking too! That book is going to make other books jealous. I'm sure I could see Suite Francaise and Mother's Milk edging towards Gods Behaving Badly with eye-scratching and hair pulling on their minds...

New newness.

I been fiddlin' with the old website again. Try http://www.crockattpowell.com/homepage.htm, click on 'Blog' on the left and the blog will reappear in the window of our webpage!

Hopefully, as we add to the site it will all cohese into a seamless and magnificent whole... or not.

Days out.

Armed with a road map and the Good Pub Guide my mate Olly and I head out to towns and villages within a days reach round London that neither of us have either been to or know anything about. Yesterday it was Arundel's turn.

As we were hurtling down the B2139 we prepared our visit with Ol reading this poem:

An Arundel Tomb

Side by side, their faces blurred,
The earl and countess lie in stone,
Their proper habits vaguely shown
As jointed armour, stiffened pleat,
And that faint hint of the absurd -
The little dogs under their feet.

Such plainness of the pre-baroque
Hardly involves the eye, until
It meets his left-hand gauntlet, still
Clasped empty in the other; and
One sees, with a sharp tender shock,
His hand withdrawn, holding her hand.

They would not think to lie so long.
Such faithfulness in effigy
Was just a detail friends would see:
A sculptor's sweet commissioned grace
Thrown off in helping to prolong
The Latin names around the base.

They would not guess how early in
Their supine stationary voyage
The air would change to soundless damage,
Turn the old tenantry away;
How soon succeeding eyes begin
To look, not read. Rigidly, they

Persisted, linked, through lengths and breadths
Of time. Snow fell, undated. Light
Each summer thronged the glass. A bright
Litter of birdcalls strewed the same
Bone-riddled ground. And up the paths
The endless altered people came,

Washing at their identity.
Now, helpless in the hollow of
An unarmorial age, a trough
Of smoke in slow suspended skeins
Above their scrap of history,
Only an attitude remains:

Time has transfigured them into
Untruth. The stone fidelity
They hardly meant has come to be
Their final blazon, and to prove
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.

Philip Larkin

O f course the tomb Larkin's describing is in nearby Chichester Cathedral but that didn't stop us visiting the cathedral in Arundel and the churches and trying to scale the ramparts of the castle in vain search of the eponymous resting place.

We liked Arundel. Above all, it's victorian gothic fraudulence. The cathedral was built in the 1870's in the style of the 1370's and the castle was largely reconstructed around the same time lending to it's particularly storybook look - very like the castle from the Shrek movies.

It was a perfectly agreeable town, not too affluent as to be snotty and repellent and not too poor as to be run-down and depressed. A half of Harvey's in a pub filled to the brim with 30 somethings listening to the Blues and everyone heroically smoking for England left us pleasant and relaxed much like the soft, winter sun outside.

We thought that because it wasn't one of those 'authentic' english medieval towns and it was a constructed pastiche it sort of took the pressure off everybody living there. It didn't feel like a barely-living museum as those other places can, stultified by their conservative, conserving inhabitants.

Anyway, a stop at the Skimmington Castle just outside Reigate for more Harvey's Sussex Ale and a view over the South Downs more than made up for the hour and a half it took to then get from Croydon to Peckham.

What more could you want - country lanes, beautiful light, rolling downs, real ale by a real fire, a castle - with a moat, and wonderful poetry. Ahh.

I turned 36 a few days ago. I have officially become middle-aged.

It must be the sun...

After yesterday's fantastic sale of Beautiful Evidence, we've just sold this today.

Oh, joys. What wonderfully discerning customers we have.

Language is the process that lashes experience to the intellect. Discuss...

I'm reading Prime Green by Robert Stone at the minute.

Here's a small extract:

"I have come to believe that language, a line of print, say, is capable of inhabiting the imagination far more intensely than any picture, however doctored. The same principle applies to the novel, if it works. No Hollywood flick, no movie of any provenance, can ever provide an experience of the battle of Borodino as intense as that provided in Tolstoy's pages. Descriptive language provides deeper penetration , attaches itself to the rods and cones of interior perception, to a greater degree than a recovered or remembered image. Language is the process that lashes experience to the intellect."

That last sentence caught me, I stopped reading, I read it again...Somewhere in that sentence he has captured a little grain of Truth. That's how I know I'm onto a writer I love. Here, at last, is someone that can express in words something I have always felt. I've tried to express a similar sense of the power of words in the past but always failed. Stone nails it.

BTW Prime Green is not yet available in the UK.

Except at C & P of course - just £15.99...

Bookselling Joy

My day has just been made. I'm off home now.

A nice customer just bought this.

If you stock it, they will come.

Atlast!

I knew I'd warm to Cormac Mcarthy eventually...

A Force of Destruction

I'm pretty dangerous at the moment...

So far this month I have:

Broken our metal shutters.

Torn a padlock apart with my bear hands.

Broken our heater by sitting on it.

Broken a light fitting by twisting a bulb anticlockwise rather than clockwise.

Bruised both my shins beneath the knee somehow. (Possibly jumping around at football?)

What's next?

The LEAST important day of the year

Saturday 21st July. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. £17.99!!!

Already on sale at Amazon for £9.99.

The one sure-fire, cash-cow, golden-goosed money tree for all of us and those lousy bastards at Tescos and Asda are going to ruin it for everybody because they want to put the REST OF THE WORLD out of business so they can finally be proved the WINNERS.

HP7 could keep us booksellers going all year. The only winners are Bloomsbury who inflate the cover price to accommodate the discounts and Rowling and the punters, of course.

But they could sensibly price it at 12.99 and nobody loses. That's a good price for the punters, us, everybody. Nobody suffers, everybody wins. Is that TOO MUCH TO ASK or am I just a hopeless old communist throwback.

When We Were Bad

Last night I was wined and dined by the lovely folks at Macmillan at a posh French joint in Soho. (so posh there were only two things on the menu I could face eating! Everything else seemed to be in squid ink sauce!)

The dinner was to celebrate Charlotte Mendelson's new book When We Were Bad, published in May. I have started reading it and it's great stuff so far, but Picador are very excited and think they could have a big literary seller on their hands. Sounds like I'm being paid to say all this eh?

Nope, not a penny. The fact is I usually hate publishing dinners/drinks but this was a good one. Charlotte was a real laugh, friendly, intelligent and very down to earth. Not only that she has read our blog. And been into the shop. Top marks Charlotte...My old mate Glenn Collins was there as well and that helped the night to fly by. He was a great supporter of Love in Idleness back in our Pan Bookshop days. Charlotte rememberd coming in to sign copies on the same day as Joanne Harris (author of Chocolat). At that point Harris was huge and selling books effortlessly. Charlotte was a debutant. It was the Time of Topping at Pan and two authors at once meant the cakes were on hand in vast quantities. Charlotte admitted to having eaten cakes from Maison Blanc before only to be slapped down by Harris in a kind of "I'm a Northern lass - we didn't have cake in them days where I grew up - only rock cake made from real rocks". Poor Charlotte left rather upset only to find Glenn chasing her down the street in heroic fashion. He gave her a book (I forget which - bloody wine) and the day was saved.

I managed not to say anything too stupid. (Though I have to confess that while discussing the Macmillan offices in Kings Cross with their sales director I said the only time I'd been there I was propositioned by a "lady of the night" despite it being ten in the morning. The sales director then proceeded to tell me that was peak time...At this point conversation around the table paused and I began to blush!)

But really the main reason I had such a good time was the brilliant wine. Er no, well it was good but - I say again -

Charlotte Mendelson ROCKS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

What we are currently listening too...

After working in a shop for several years with no music it's such a relief to have some quality tunes playing in the store to help us through the day. The best thing is being able to choose. In Waterstoney days it tended to be the same management-approved easy-listening over and over again which slowly drove us all mad. Here, luckily, Matthew and I have similarly eclectic tastes which has seen us swing from Glenn Gould playing Mozart piano sonatas, the ever-present Late Junction, Steve Reich, Scarlatti, Phil Spector, Amadou and Mariam, Joanna Newsom and some Argentine Tango.

This week though we will be mostly listening to David Byrne's new playlist called appropriately enough, Icicles - Northern European contemporary music. Mr Byrne, you have excelled yourself, as usual.