“Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters” (pre-ordered), and “Mr Darcy, Vamprye” (currently en route).
These are the only way I’m ever going to be able to cope with these type of classic books! Monsters! Vampires! Yay!
I shall post a review once I’ve read ’em 🙂
Fed up with lending books (librarians), interpreting the law in them (lawyers), or just feeling a burning desire to get more fun out of working with books?
The Job:
The Children’s Bookshop in Edinburgh is expanding and opening a new bookshop for grown-up fiction and non-fiction. The manager will need to develop core stock, as well as undertake daily stock replenishment and new stock ordering. She or he will also be responsible for event organisation, cashing up, maintaining the customer mailing list, customer orders and managing any additional staff. The manager will contribute to overall business development. Work days will be Tuesday-Saturday.
The person:
The candidate will have a proven track record in bookselling as well as experience of managing staff and budgets. Good IT skills and excellent interpersonal skills are a must. She or he must be self-motivated, but also work well in a team with other staff and with The Children’s Bookshop. Reliability is vital.
Those nice people at Fidra books are expanding into the world of grown-up books, and need a manager for this new venture. Wouldn’t it be nice to actually work with books you’d like to read, and recommend to others to read? (I would strongly advise against reading law books for pleasure, unless your definition of pleasure also includes pulling out your own fingernails, and watching the growth of mould in damp areas). The bookshop will open on the 5th September 2009, and I’m hoing to take a trip over.
Prior to the opening of the bookshop for grown-ups (apparently, calling it an “adult bookshop” might attract the wrong type of customers 😉 ), they’re using the space as a gallery for illustrations by some wonderful childrens book artists.during a period which also encompasses the Edinburgh International Book Festival. The Fidra Gallery will be open from the 11th July – 29th August…think I might make it over to that side of town to have a look. And if I’m feeling too lazy, it’s got a website too.
They’re also on Twitter as @FidraBooks
It’s so nice to have such a friendly, fun and communicative independant bookshop in town, instead of just the Big Beasts of Waterstone’s and the supermarket ‘reading for the lowest common denominator’ options! Through their blog and their Twitter posts, I feel like I know the staff already, without ever having met them!
Ohhh, there’s just nothing like the scent of old, mouldering books to make you feel at home in a library, so when you’re feeling lost while sitting at your desk, paging through the latest electronic information source, why not blast a spray of this around, and think back to happy times spent researching obscure points, buried in ancient texts…
Other varieties available…maybe 😉
I’m not one for Regency romances, or any book where the “plucky” heroine has to struggle womanfully against the suffocating strictures of the moral code of her day (in a ladylike, delicate manner), so Jane Austen books have never appealed to me…but if you throw in something a bit different, like zombies, I perk up! So, when I read there was a new book coming out, a mashup of Pride and Prejudice, with zombies, I pre-ordered straight away!
I’ve enjoyed reading this (despite some editing / proof reading errors: e.g. I know for a fact that the English countryside has at no point been the native home of chipmunks, and the concept of “coy ponds” instead of “koi ponds” in a Japanese parkland setting was a bit jarring), and the addition of zombies definitely made it more entertaining: no walk in the English countryside, or carriage ride to London was safe from violent zombie attacks. And no young lady of refinement is considered to be accomplished unless she is skilled in the Deadly Arts, and has studied them in Japan or China. So the various encounters, and methods of despatching then certainly made for a bit of light relief when the “thwarted love that it was indelicate to discuss” thaaang kept coming up. And, although I early on thought I’d like a copy of the original to compare this to, to see where the differences from the original text are (other than the zombies), now I know I just couldn’t cope with having to read it. It ain’t made an Austin fan of me…but perhaps it has made a zombie fan of me.
Next, I shall read of one poet’s descent into the zombie horror by buying Zombie Haiku…
Dumpling in a Hanky 