The Land That Is Life
August 2025
In curating some of the pre-loved stock, it’s tempting to say that we’ll hang on to this or hang on to that. Save this for that holiday, that for this holiday. Equally, what I’ve been trying to execute more of is the anticipatory – what readers might like to see more (or less) of and maybe the broader sense what brings us to an online bookshop, anyway? Sometimes it’s a specific book or author or edition, and sometimes we simply don’t know. What haven’t I read, who is to be discovered, what edition have I not seen yet? There is that pleasure of taking things in.
I thought of this when looking for an edition of Jenny Erpenbeck’s Visitation (Portobello, and translated by Susan Bernofsky). I’d gifted a friend the copy I’d brought with me to Berlin, a copy that came with me to a Hertha-Berlin match because I’d thought I’d spend my time reading while my son watched the match (how wrong I was – what a match!) – I eventually found the other copy, the one I didn’t bring to Berlin, and though it doesn’t have ‘the story’ the other does, I’m glad it’s there with other companions in the library. But, I’ve diverged.
While the bricks and mortar is in hot pursuit, we’ve been thinking that although August is Women in Translation month, it’s a section that we’d like to curate and flesh out for all the months of the year – while the spotlight for a month is a good and great thing, wouldn’t it also be a good and great thing to have a place to explore many women in translation? The din, I think, has already commenced…
Let us know what you think, and what or who you’d like to more of and we’ll busy ourselves to make that happen. In the meantime, we’ve got some new books coming from The Gallery Press and we might even pair one or two with a vintage-mate – do have a look-in over the next few days, many good things soon in-store.
Some Blue
July 2025
Embracing choice but not risking the rash, how to best curate some loved-with-use stock for the online shop. And while there are no secrets, there are attachments. That I’ve paused. And paused again it’s a wonder I’m up and running at all. Keeping the Nadine Gordimer’s to one side; I hadn’t realised how many I had until recently, and maybe more on that later having re-read Something Out There. I’ve let an older but most winsome edition of Colette’s short stories sojourn overnight on the kitchen table. And overnight, again. Clearly, I’m not ready, yet, for that edition’s exit and it’s made me want to look at other older and newer editions. Which leads to Living by the Word by Alice Walker. It’s a first edition. And like many books, it was a book I tried to read carefully but at the same time use. As in handle.
I bought the book when visiting someone who had no actual books in their home other than a few cookbooks or those I might have previously bought and left. A disorientating experience, such an amount of mental blank canvas that my head kept asking: but a house with no books? Walker’s Living by the Word is linked with that visit as it was found in a moment of respite. The duck into a serendipitous bookshop while other convictions & conversations carried on and I sometimes think of the safety I found on Walker’s face that graces this edition’s front, and back. Was it safety, I later asked, or Walker’s sound sense or nothing but another version of being in safe hands? Somewhere between acquiring the book and later travels that included something akin to a lite version of Planes, Trains & Automobiles meant the dustjacket suffered a tear here, then there. And then here, again. I will of course plea that it’s a dustjacket of times gone: there’s no protective seal to the linen.
Years later and I might have thought better the day I went down to the bottom shed (another serendipitous respite) so down in the reality of the dark of a situation, life being life, and that convinced that only Walker’s piece Am I Blue? would soothe. Because I wasn’t thinking better, or maybe I was precisely thinking best, it strikes me now that I reached for Walker that day to understand: this thinking-by-way-of-reading thing I’ve been at since I was a young girl. I’ve always thought that to understand would afford a grace, glean a meaning, give clarity. And reading again that piece on that day I understood a little more the human-animal connection, the animal-human in us; primal elements, to be held captive and the desire for freedom.
Autonomy, and kindness. What it means to attend, and take care. They too are other qualities that I’d ascribe to Walker’s piece Am I Blue? I’m quite sure there were other books I could have reached for in both above-mentioned circumstances. But I didn’t. It simply happened that way. Walker and a horse called Blue called into my thoughts, and I needed to pull the thread. Maybe with more care I might have kept this first edition of Walker’s Living by the Word on a higher shelf or behind a piece of obscure glass. And I mightn’t have later brought it down to the bottom shed. I imagine it would mean that the book might be worth something else entirely. It would have meant no glean of another blue on blue, and it would have meant sans for the not-for-fools gold. Sometimes a goodness in letting the good stick. Though a rogue Buddhist might protest.
