Juxtabook

Juxtabook's Classics Revisited Bookclub

Juxtabook's Classics Revisited Bookclub is a venture that I've been planning for quite a while. I now have an account with a book wholesaler so I can sell new books too. I wanted to combine this with my knowledge of the very long tail of publishing (the one that still swished 100-200 years ago) and offer a subscription Bookclub aimed at solving life's present buying problems!

So, the first Bookclub is one that will focus on less well-known classics: the sort of thing that if you like the Brontes or Dickens will be just your cup of tea, though needless to say those authors won't be on my sending list as their books are too well known. All the books will have had their first publication before 1960. All copies will be new paperbacks.

I'll be offering a choice of 12, 6 or 3 months' subscriptions and the emphasis will be on the fact that this is a present. All the subscriptions will start off with a literary themed present in the parcel along with the book, and with the option of a handwritten card (card not tag) in an envelope with your message, and all the books will be beautifully wrapped, month after month, and then securely packaged. The aim being that your recipient really feels that they are experiencing your present throughout the whole year (or part year if you opt for a shorter subscription).

If you're interested you can see the UK prices here. For other countries I will have to do a quote based on the increased postage. Let me know if you are interested and would like to know the international postage.

There is still time to order a subscription as a Christmas gift and have the first book and literary gift arrive before the big day within the UK. You can of course order for other events and have the gift start in any month of the year. You're also welocme to have the parcels addressed to a couple, not just one person, which can make it more economic.

If you have suggestions that you'd like to add, please let me know.

 

**Edited to add: just in case it isn't 100% clear, although I am best know as a seller of secondhand books, these books supplied through the bookclub will be brand new shiny paperbacks: the contents will be old classics but the books themselves will be new.

Small Kindnesses by Fiona Robyn - free download

Awhile ago I reviewed the utterly charming The Blue Handbag by Fiona Robyn. It has just been re-released with a new title, Small Kindnesses and a lovely new cover.

For today and tomorrow (26th and 27th November) the download is free for Kindle reading click for Amazon UK and Amazon US. You can read more on Fiona's blog. It is well worth getting hold of, as it is the perfect fireside read in this dark, damp weather.

There is a paperback version coming soon too and it will appear here .

New blog: Gifted by Juxtabook

Just a quick post to tell you about a new blog I've started. As I was making notes on books to read with bright 9-14 year olds it seemed silly not to publish them. So I've started Gifted by Juxtabook. The top cohort of children are known as 'gifted and talented' or G&T and schools have a duty to identify these chidlren and address their special need. So, using that title of gifted and talented I've gone with gifted for the name of the blog. These are not full blown reviews but summaries and notes on watch points, as the problem for bright children is often appropriate subject matter and appropriate reading level are out of kilter.

I will be doing my best to keep up with proper reviewing duties on here too!

Bookselling coincidences

Books of like feather often seem to be sold together. Sometimes the reasons for this are obvious. In January 2006 I found myself selling every copy of a compilation of 'Peter Simple' columns that I had. I then realised that the creator, journalist Michael Wharton, had just died. A writer's death often increases the interest in their work so that is not that surprising. Neither was selling out of copies of Gowk Storm by Nancy Brysson Morrison (excellent Canongate edition introduced by Edwin Morgan) after a particularly good radio adaptation, as such serialisation is bound to bring interest.

What is more odd are the days when I seem to sell on a theme. On one occasion every book sold that day had Marx (or Marxist) in the title, and that kind of thing seems to happen more often than you'd think. The oddest was selling, over the course of 24 hours, three different books on different subjects that all had part of the same painting on the cover: "Coalbrookdale by Night", by Philip de Loutherbourg. You can see it here on one of those books, The Romantics: England in a Revolutionary Age by E. P. Thompson.

 

Another funny one was selling a book to my childhood home village and a few moments later another book to my husband's childhood home village. Neither village is near here, or near each other.

I suppose a mathematician would say that I am misunderstanding coincidence; that books are complex objects, with so many facets (contents, author, themes, illustrators, design, publisher, country of origin, etc), and the customers too, have lots of features, and that in some of these large lists coincidence is more likely than not amongst the many features. And I guess that's true.

So it is very much a moment of folk wisdom when I look at a day's sales and think, 'How odd!' But it happens a lot.

Colour Scheme by Ngaio Marsh

Colour Scheme by Ngaio Marsh was a re-read as I was looking for classic crime to read for a young person's bookclub*. I bought this for myself with a gift voucher from W.H. Smiths in Burnley when I was 15. One of January's great pleasures as a teenager was spending my gift vouchers, preferably on books. I loved Colour Scheme then, as I do now, and it started a long love affair with the crime fiction of New Zealander Ngaio Marsh.

Many of her novels are set in England but this one, written and set during WWII, is set in New Zealand. The Claires are an ineffectual colonial family retired from Indian service to run a health spa amongst the hot springs of New Zealand. The parents are useless with money and very conscious of their class. The grown-up children Barbara and Simon are, in their different ways, very gauche, and lack either the sophistication or the leadership that the usual upper middle class boarding school educated young people might have which leads them both into difficult situations repeatedly. Though perfectly pleasant and hard working, they word hard in the wrong way, worry about the wrong things, and are generally unfit to run their retreat.

Offsetting the pleasant uselessness of the Claires is Mrs Claire's brother Dr Accrington, an eminent doctor in the mould of Maggie Smith's Dowager Countess of Grantham from Downton Abbey. He is one of my favourite characters in detective fiction and has a range of put downs I should learn by heart for future use, though of course I won't.

As well as their usual residents a famous Shakespearean actor and his entourage appear. The arrival of this group and the impending financial collapse of the Claires upset the uneasy stability of the retreat causing tensions to run very high.

The crime strand is two-fold: a resident of the retreat is a suspected spy and shipping is being sunk by enemy craft; and, as a consequence of this, someone is murdered. This is a neat transposition of the country house murder to the primordial landscape of the hot springs, as we have a fairly tight and stable group of suspects in a confined area. Added to this are the local Maoris, some of whom we meet, and one last newcomer to the scene, Septimus Falls.

One of Marsh's strengths is her handling of different of levels of society. Whilst there are inevitably some of the assumptions of the era, on the whole maoris, upper classes, middle classes are treated more as individuals than as types. The New Zealand setting is not given the middle class veneer of the time. It would have been alien to many of the intended readership but Marsh doesn't shy away from this, glorying in the landscape's difference:

Barbara stood for a moment at one of the open windows and stared absently at the freakish landscape. Hills smudged with scrub were ranked against a heavy sky. Beyond them across the hidden inlet, but tall enough to dominate the scene, rose the truncated cone of Rangi's Peak, an extinct volcano so characteristically shaped that it might have been placed in the landscape by a modern artist with a passion for simplified form. Though some eight miles away, it was actually clearer than the nearby hills, for their margins, dark and firm, were broken at intervals by plumes of steam that rose perpendicularly from the eight thermal pools.

The pools become a perverse theatrical set. The veranda of the house overlooks them. It's platform nature might make it look like the stage, but often the inhabitants find themselves the audience, looking instead to the auditorium of the pools as they realise, in a baffled way, that the real action is happening down there. The colonials thought they were observing the landscape but we're left with the sense that the landscape is observing them.

Marsh's background, like that of fellow crime novelist Josephine Tey, was theatrical and this comes over strongly in many of her books. If you like theatre and theatrically themed mysteries like  Nicola Upton's Tey mysteries then I am sure you'll enjoy this. Operating on many levels, and with the marvellous Dr Accrington to amuse, it is a great winter evening read.

Colour Scheme appears to be out of print as a single volume but it is available with a number of other Marsh titles thus A Surfeit of Lampreys / Death and the Dancing Footman / Colour Scheme (The Ngaio Marsh Collection, Book 4) and as a kindle download here .

*Any suggestions for books for very bright pre-teens gratefully received.

Blue Friday by Mike French

I have reviewed a book by Mike French before. That one, The Ascent of Isaac Steward, was wonderful but it was hard, a form of extreme reading both linguistically and psychologically, if you will. By comparison the new offering, Blue Friday,is a whizz of a slick, smooth read satirising the modern quest for the work-life balance with real finesse. I compared his last book to a Michelin starred meal; this one is more like a well executed ballroom dance, light (in the most positive sense), well directed, sharp and elegant.

In 2034 Lieutenant Richard Trent works for the Family Protection Agency, dedicated to stopping overtime, working on weekends, and all of that malarkey. Overtime has become an underground business, and doing it could cost you your life. Pills to make you work, sort of the uppers of overtime, are illegal and being caught carrying them could cause serious trouble, and their effects are feared by the authorities:

In twenty nineteen a man called George Winston smuggled a pack of tablets and company markers into a commuter train and handed them round like sweeties. By Potters Bar half the train were high and conducting brain storming exercises using the black markers on the windows, floor, everywhere.

The draconian hand of the law doesn't just enforce the overtime ban: it preserves family time by enforced viewing of family television (what an appalling thought!) and monitoring family meal-times. And if you don't have a family by 25 then the state will ensure that you do by selecting a spouse by computer for you.

By turning the norms of our own society on their head, and looking at them through the experiences of one nuclear family in hiding, Mike French certainly makes us think about freedom, and how laws to protect, to fence us in from harm, also just simply fence us in. It also shows how freedom fighters often inflict trouble upon their families and that the law will always be an ass when taken to its logical conclusion. What happens when an anti-overtime enforcement agent reaches the end of his shift the second he's about to catch a fugitive? He chooses between letting the fugitive go or becoming one himself.

Although easily marketable as futuristic genre fiction this is much more than that, as you'd expect from a man whose last novel should have come with a PhD for every reader. An entertaining, satisfying and witty read.

Blue Friday has been out for a couple of months as an e-book for the Kindle but is being launched as a paperback at Novacon, the UK's longest-established regional science fiction convention, on Saturday.

Hanging on in there

Yet another post apologising for my blogging silence. This last year has not been good for the booktrade. I know of a number of dealers bringing forward their retirements or otherwise moving away from bookselling. C L Hawley is still here and will live to fight another year, but only because I've spent most of the last year fighting for it, and that has sadly left little room for reading, never mind blogging.

Anyway, catching my breath, I finally have time for a few reviews, so November should see some new posts. First up will be a review of Blue Friday by Mike French which is out very soon.

In the meantime it is easier to find time to tweet or add a few lines to the business Facebook page than write a full post on here. You can always catch-up with me there.

A last word should go to my books newsletter - this is now going out once a month with new stock news and discounts, and we also have a book of the month email with a book discounted for one day only. You can sign up here. It goes without saying that your details will never ever be passed on.