What a fortnight

It's been pacier than a Lee Child plot

Oct 16, 2022

Cut! (Apparently this Robert Harris was damaged *before* the Deputy Mayor of Wandsworth arrived.)

Sorry for the silence. I’m not sure if I mentioned but I opened a bookshop.

Let’s just say the first two weeks have been…quite busy. The team and I have made 314 coffees, poured 115 glasses of wine, sold 198 tote bags and thousands of books. The hardest thing has been getting books back on shelves quick enough - which is a pretty good problem to have. (Even so, after that fortnight, I think I’d like to claim the 116th glass of wine. Actually, make it a bottle.)

So please forgive me if these updates become a little less frequent, at least as the pace only builds until Christmas. (Do come and say hello, though: we’re open at 71 Balham High Road every day apart from Monday, 10am-6pm - and til 9pm Thursday-Saturday.)

But I wanted to share these pictures of the bookshop in action, and three things I thought you might enjoy:

Join us for our first events

I’m very excited with the line-up for our first ever events in the bookshop. If you fancy joining us for any of the following, more information and tickets are here.

Craig Brown (2nd Nov) - the mischievous satirist, critic and author of Ma’am Darling: 99 Glimpses of Princes Margaret and One, Two, Three, Four: The Beatles in Time will be joining us to discuss his latest collection, Haywire: The Best of Craig Brown
Fatima Manji (15 Nov) - the Channel 4 News journalist and presenter will discuss her book Hidden Heritage: Rediscovering Britain’s Relationship with the Orient, a journey across Britain’s cultural landmarks as a nation grapples with its identity and the legacy of empire
Marina Hyde (30 Nov) - the Guardian columnist will discuss the perfectly normal state of contemporary British politics and her new collection, What Just Happened?!: Dispatches from Turbulent Times

The backstory of Backstory

Jimmy McLoughlin quizzed me on the transition from newsroom to bookshop, and on Backstory’s first few days, for his podcast, Jimmy’s Jobs. You can listen here.

The inaugural Backstory chart

So…what’s selling? Here’s our inaugural top 10 from the opening fortnight. The Booker Prize shortlist has flown out, unsurprisingly, as has lots and lots of fiction. And, apart from the new Richard Osman and the so-inexpensive-and-slim-it-may-as-well-be-a-paperback Small Things Like These, they’re all paperbacks. (Hardbacks have been selling, but, at £20 or £25, they don’t fly out the way paperbacks do.)

A couple of things made me smile. One was that the last book Clive James completed before he died, an anthology of poetry to “get by heart”, outsold even the mighty Osman. The other: that we sold dozens and dozens of copies of Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe, just a great book that I love even though it was published four years ago. We’re talking about it in our inaugural book club tomorrow, but lots of the sales were to people who aren’t attending. It’s nice to see that if you love something and shout about it, people respond.

Anyway, here’s the list: