We`re not talking about rooms that are just full of books. We`re talking about bookshops in barns, disused factories, converted churches & underground car parks. Bookshops on boats, on buses, & in old run-down train stations. Fold-out bookshops, undercover bookshops, this-is-the-best-place-I`ve-ever-been-to-bookshops. Meet Sarah & her Book Barge sailing across the sea to France; meet Sebastien, in Mongolia, who sells books to herders of the Altai mountains; meet the bookshop in Canada that`s invented the world`s first antiquarian book vending machine. & that`s just the beginning. From the oldest bookshop in the world, to the smallest you could imagine, The Bookshop Book examines the history of books, talks to authors about their favourite places, & looks at over two hundred weirdly wonderful bookshops across six continents (sadly, we`ve yet to build a bookshop down in the South Pole). The Bookshop Book is a love letter to bookshops all around the world. ”A good bookshop is not just about selling books from shelves, but reaching out into the world & making a difference.” (David Almond). The Bookshop Book

Includes:: interviews "es from David Almond, Ian Rankin, Tracy Chevalier, Audrey Niffenegger, Jacqueline Wilson, Jeanette Winterson & many, many others.

...

In early 2009 a strange sort of business plan landed on the desk of a pinstriped bank manager. It had pictures of rats & moles in rowing boats & archaic"es about Cleopatra`s barge. It asked for a GBP30, 000 loan to buy a black-&-cream narrowboat & a small hoard of books. The manager said no. Nevertheless The Book Barge opened six months later & enjoyed the happy patronage of local readers, a growing number of eccentrics & the odd moorhen. Business wasn`t always easy, so one May morning owner Sarah Henshaw set off for six months chugging the length & breadth of the country. Books were bartered for food, accommodation, bathroom facilities & cake. During the journey, the barge suffered a flooded engine, went out to sea, got banned from Bristol &, on several occasions, floated away altogether. This account follows the ebbs & flows of Sarah`s journey as she sought to make her vision of a floating bookshop a reality. ...

Need experience on your Gap Year? Try murder. Bored of the `mango smoothie` trail & keen to spice up their Facebook albums, & perhaps also their sex lives, Jake & Will take a tour into China`s jungle borderland with Burma. Their guide, however, has his own agenda & gradually the two gap-year students slip into a nightmarish spiral of murder & moral decay; their chance of survival determined by a game of hide & seek played out with deadly crossbows. This is a fast paced, adrenaline ride of a novel: ” Deliverance” meets ” Lord of the Flies”. ...

With an introduction by novelist Rachel Kushner In the vanishing world of the Old West, two cowboys begin an epic adventure, & their own coming-of-age stories. In All the Pretty Horses, John Grady Cole`s search for a future takes him across the Mexican border to a job as a ranch hand & an ill-fated romance. The Crossing is the story of sixteen-year-old Billy Parham, who sets off on a perilous journey across the mountains of Mexico, accompanied only by a lone wolf. Eventually the two come together in Cities of the Plain, in a stunning tale of loyalty & love.A true classic of American literature, The Border Trilogy is Cormac Mc Carthy`s award-winning requiem for the American frontier. Beautiful & brutal, filled equally with sorrow & humour, it is a powerful story of two friends growing up in a world where blood & violence are conditions of life. ...

The Borough area of London in 1872 in a series of exceptionally detailed reproductions of old Ordnance Survey street plans for areas of larger cities which have undergone substantial redevelopment in the late 19th or the early 20th century, published in the Alan Godfrey Editions. The plans, printed in back & white, have been taken from the original Ordnance Survey mapping at 1:1, 056 & reproduced at 1:1, 760 – the equivalent of 36 inches (or one yard) to a mile. The maps provide an unrivalled, house-by-house picture of streets & individual buildings with inner courtyards, outbuildings, pavements, covered passages, etc. Many important institutions are named; within the National Galley on Trafalgar Square even the individual rooms (the map is from 1871, so no French Impressionists as yet!). On the reverse are historical notes about the area covered by the map, plus extracts from contemporary street directories. These maps provide a fascinating addition to Alan Godfrey’s huge series of some 2, 000 titles presenting reproductions of street plans at taken from the Ordnance Survey mapping at 1:2, 500 (25” to 1 mile) & reprinted at about 15 inches to one mile (1:4, 340). ...

Where there is murder, there is humanity. Hong Kong`s greatest detective, Inspector Kwan, is dying. For the past fifty years he has been quietly solving crimes while the world changed around him. Now on his deathbed, his partner Detective Lok needs help with one final case. Through the story of six different but interlocking murders, this bold & intricate crime novel spans five decades of love, honour, jealousy & revenge, in one of the world`s most intriguing nations. ...

In this delightful, funny & moving first novel, a librarian & a young boy obsessed with reading take to the road. Lucy Hull, a 26-year-old children's librarian in Hannibal, Missouri, finds herself both kidnapper & kidnapped when her favourite patron, 10-year-old Ian Drake, runs away from home. The precocious Ian is addicted to reading, but needs Lucy's help to smuggle books past his overbearing mother, who has enrolled Ian in weekly anti-gay classes. Lucy, a rebel at heart beneath her librarian's exterior, stumbles into a moral dilemma when she finds Ian camped out in the library after hours, with a knapsack of provisions & an escape plan. Desperate to save him from the Drakes, Lucy allows herself to be hijacked by Ian. The odd pair embark on an improvised road trip from Missouri to Vermont, with ferrets & an inconvenient boyfriend thrown in their path. Along the way, Lucy struggles to make peace with her Russian immigrant father & his fugitive past, & is forced to use his shady connections to escape discovery. But is it just Ian who is running away? Who is the strange man on their tail? & should Lucy be trying to save a boy from his own parents? ...

Julian Woodford uncovers the breathtakingly appalling life of Joseph Merceron (1764-1839), gangster & corrupt magistrate, who accumulated enormous wealth while presiding over the creation of the poorest slums in Georgian London. Ruling Spitalfields & Bethnal Green from his base in Brick Lane for half a century, Merceron gave the East End the bad reputation that still lingers today, while the exploits of recent mobsters & political miscreants pale by comparison with his staggering violence & ruthlessness. Julian Woodford`s shrewd biography
- the first on this subject
- is essential reading for all those interested in eighteenth century London, anyone fascinated by the capital`s criminal history & everyone who loves an exciting true story well told.

...

In this elegant & impassioned synthesis from one of the world`s leading experts on Africa & poverty, economist Paul Collier writes persuasively that although nearly five billion of the world`s people are beginning to climb from desperate poverty & to benefit from globalization`s reach to developing countries, there is a ”bottom billion” of the world`s poor whose countries, largely immune to the forces of global economy, are falling farther behind & are in danger of falling apart, separating permanently & tragically from the rest of the world. Collier identifies & explains the four traps that prevent the homelands of the world`s billion poorest people from growing & receiving the benefits of globalization
- civil war, the discovery & export of natural resources in otherwise unstable economies, being landlocked & therefore unable to participate in the global economy without great cost, & finally, ineffective governance. As he demonstrates that these billion people are quite likely in danger of being irretrievably left behind, Collier argues that we cannot take a ”headless heart” approach to these seemingly intractable problems; rather, that we must harness our despair & our moral outrage at these inequities to a reasoned & thorough understanding of the complex & interconnected problems that the world`s poorest people face.
...

The bestselling author of The Endurance reveals the startling truth behind the legend of the Mutiny on the Bounty
- the most famous
...