Rail trip! Rail trip!
In the quest for accuracy and the proper use of words, what an author did ought to be good at and all that, I acknowledge the chant is ‘road trip’ but… I don’t do roads much. I am car free … Continued
bookselling
Every Gig’s A Gamble
… and sometimes you’re going to lose. It’s something I often find myself saying to other traders at events, whether it’s a surprisingly good show or a frustratingly bad one. But accepting that it’s something of a gamble every single … Continued
Revival? Reunion? Reinvention? Whatever it is, it’s Eroticon time again…
The last time I wrote a post like this was, well, in the last days of the Before Times, having been a bit quicker off the mark than usual with my Eroticon Meet & Greet in 2020. (As some of … Continued
Cheaper online?
Every now and again someone picks up a book, examines it with interest, then looks it up on their phone, announces it’s cheaper on Amazon and puts it down again. This is fine, I get it (particularly these days, of … Continued
The Night Market: an evening of surprises
The Night Market was certainly full of surprises. Possibly the first surprise was the organisers agreeing to let me take a stall: this is absolutely not a fetish or adult event (so yes, I left the hardcore bondage, fisting and … Continued
Jubiwank: were you naughty or nice?
Definitions are going to be enormously subjective here: participation or non-participation in this weekend’s four-day Jubiwank being nicer or naughtier depending on what you did and why. Though the number of people who would actually be pooing with rage at … Continued
Book thieves and book poseurs
It’s not particularly new for social media, or sectors of it, to be enabling book thieves. Just like music thieves, and film thieves, the internet is full of the idea that stealing art, particularly digital art, is somehow sticking it … Continued
It’s #WorldBookDay and we still love books
#WorldBookDay can certainly be on the tiresome side if you have kids at primary school, especially if you actually like books rather more than you enjoy contriving fancy-dress costumes. You can mostly ignore the invasion of the day by sellers … Continued
Shenanigans signing – win tickets for yourself and a friend
During the early, volatile stages of the spring of 2020, some of us were hoping Shenanigans would go ahead even as all the other dominoes were falling: unfortunately it became unfeasible to hold it, and the same was true of … Continued
The joys of outdoor trading
Home from a merry afternoon’s bookselling in the New Forest, I started remembering how some of my earliest stallholding antics involved outdoor trading. At 21 or so, long before fetish markets (or, indeed, before working out that I might … Continued