AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL Wirksworth Branch will be holding one of their Send a Message of Hope sessions at the Bookshop, with wine and mince pies from 7.30 to 9.30 on Tuesday 9 December. You write messages for Christmas to individual prisoners of conscience. They provide names and addresses and cards, "all you need is a pen". (Surely they can provide that!) We are opening the bookshop during this period and will make a donation if we do well. I hope you don't think that opening for business is unethical - it might even bring in some more supporters for Amnesty. If you can't make the Scarthin session, Amnesty will be at the Baptist Church Room, Wirksworth from 10-12 and at the Green way Cafe, Matlock on Saturday 6th. December. N.B. the different date.
The Christmas Table has now been set up to take the seasonal overflow of hardback and other books, and will remain in place until the New Year.
We are trying to have a holiday from second-hand and antiquarian buying during December, as the season makes things frantic and second-hand books are, despite our exhortations, not often selected as presents. This does not mean that no new old books will apear on our shelves, as we have a large backlog to work through. In particular a considerable AVIATION COLLECTION has arrived and is being fed out when we have time and room. The books are almost entirely post-war publications, but include volumes of the PUTNAM histories of aircraft design and manufacture and other specialised works, particularly on second-world-war planes, campaigns, units and personnel.
Jools is cooking special Vegetarian Christmas Dinners
and/or Vegan/Gluten Free on weekdays from Monday 24th. November. Mouthwatering aromas of Chestnut and Mushroom Pie have been drifting down the stairs, and optionalApple Crumble is made from Scarthin garden apples - Crawley Beauty and Derbyshire's own Newton Wonder varieties.
If you are interested please telephone 01629-823272 or e-mail to enquire or book. Best to speak to Jools or Eve on a weekday.
IF I have got round to it, the choice of menus can be found on the cafe page of this site.The Apple Crumble will feature our own garden-grown Newton Wonder and Crawley Beauty apples. We are at present
processing ANOTHER big climbing/mountaineering collection, and are busy making room by reducing
the shelvage allowed for Literary Criticism. Are we becoming a Hearty rather than
an Aesthetic bookshop??
Further additions to second-hand stock include a couple of shelves of archaeology, some lovely Stephen Jay Gould hardbacks and a stack of good piano music, including duets.
On Saturday 29th. June, 7 for 7.30, Geoff bagley will be introducing us to the Anthropic Principle and its implications for the Scientific Method and for notions of Multiverses. Usual 3 british-monetary-units admission includes a light savoury dish half way through.
Apple Day this year was Saturday 18th. October. Once again, we were blessed with wonderful weather - a perfect sunny Autumn afternoon. Fairfield Nursery, Beano's and Julian Brandram (links to follow if I get time) brought stalls of produce and samples, Pat and Andrew Reid and family brought musicians, the Well Dressed Band, (who practise in the Hathersage Bell Room) and another screw press, and Rick Allen brought his amazing combo of home-made Beam Press and mashing tub. All three presses were hard at it from 1 until after 5, often to the accompaniment of Appalachian and other foot-tapping music from the dozen (depleted, apparently!) musicians. There are still a lot of apples to be used up, and Rick is pressing at the Temple Hotel, Matlock Bath on Tuesday evenings until at least 28th. October. The pressed apple pulp is being fed to the pigs of Cromford and Middleton-by-Wirksworth, whose relish indicates that it still contains flavour and nourishment!
We have uplifted part of an extensive pastoral collection of books published or re-published within the last decade or so; almost all in immaculate condition and including commentaries, sermons and classic theological discussions from a wide range between the "wings" of the Anglican and Evangelical traditions. I'm ad-libbing here, I scarcely had time to glance at titles and the first ton is still out there in the van. We can't even display most of this collection here at Scarthin. Is anyone interested in taking some from us in bulk, for a friendly price - what about you, Ian Blakemore?
A dedicated and possibly extreme climber is going travelling and has sold us some 500 climbing books, mostly published within the last forty years. The core of this collection is some 300 climbing and mountaineering memoirs by the greats, all in protected dustjackets and more or less mint. There are a few rare or signed editions, but the majority have been priced at between 6 and 10 pounds not so sterling. An opportunity to acquire modern classics as new but at post-crunch prices. There are also a good number of climbing guides - but these are of course well used! See both our shelves and rare book list.
We are pleased to announce that we have among us the BRAIN OF MENSA 2008, namely Les Hurst . Les, hitherto known merely as the Brain of Ilketson applies his erudition and style to the description of many of our Rare Book List volumes (also available via ABE) and to aspects of our accounting system, which demands a suprisingly large segment of his spare storage capacity and will, I hope, dazzle the Excise and the Inland Revenue. Les won the title in the final round held this last Sunday, 21st In Liverpool, by clicking on which you get linked to the Liverpool Daily Post's Report and, ultimately to Liverpool City of Culture. Today, Wednesday 24th. we celebrated in the Vineyard with the traditional tea and disgusting sticky cakes, bought in from the Arkwright Stores as our own bake are too wholesome.
Our trusty author of Journey from Darkness,namely Gordon Ottewell will be here from 2 until 4 on Saturday 27th. September to launch and sign copies of his autobiographical
July and August were busy months, slightly up on last year, so the fiction shelves have been heavily raided. We are trying to refill them in time for the new academic-year reading lists. I keep slipping a few more poultry books in from an extensive collection in store and in addition we have now had in a selection of very select books on fany breeds of fowl, inlcuding three different edition's of Lewis Wright's great volume. A somewhat distressed collection from a dynasty of furniture-makers is on the shelf or on the net, likewise a coiple of shelves of science and scientific speculation by such as Penrose, Pais, Bohm, Smoot, Lorenz, Feynman, Rees, Davies, Gribbin and oh, I nearly forgot, Einstein. We have also put out a fair range of books from the 40's to the 70's on motor-racing (Bira Era), canals (Pilkington Ilk) and railways(Nock-nacks?), mostly lacking dustwrappers/jackets and therefore inexpensive. Towards the other end we have been fondling a beautiful and 2000-folio(quarto?)-page two-volume Gaelic Dictionary from 1829.Should I replace my trusty Dwelly? Oh, and yes, some volumes of OUP's Discoveries in the Judaean Desert will be appearing on this site, mostly concerning Qumran Cave 4.
We have just taken in a couple of hundred books on yachting - from the design of boats to the techniques of sailing to narratives of exploration - including a number of classics, BUT, while all those precious Reader's Digest books, Roget's Thesaurus, Crossword Dictionaries and BBC Tie-ins were safely immured in the study, the Sailing Collection was shelved with the Boat itself, - IN THE GARAGE. At least they were not piled on the concrete floor (fatal in one winter), but the damp brieze-block wall has mildewed many of the covers - so you may find some good titles at low prices, reflecting their condition. We have been sneered at for shelving among our stock books in less than "VG" condition, but I have always prefered to offer interesting material at a low price than not at all.
June and July were so hectic with events - book launches and signings, Independent Booksellers' Week and Celebrating Cromford (The Village Fete) that none of these were mentioned here. August should be busy in the shop, providing the weather is suitably wet, but events really recommence in September.
Today, 2nd. April 2008, Dave will be attending the funeral of
First Loves is a collection of very short stories woven around the Victorian dolls that Miss McCrea collected. She claimed to have collected the stories too but, if so, she transmuted them into a classic shape. Had they not been so powerful, we would not have published a volume so far from our usual local studies area. Using contemporary colour and black-and-white illustrations, we produced the book in the format of an 1890's slim hardback with coloured-illustrated unlaminated paper-covered boards, as if Printed in Bavaria by chromolithography.A very few copies remain in stock here at £10. We may post something more on Lilian's life and works at some stage. In the meantime, First Loves is a sleeper awaiting discovery and due celebration.
Meanwhile, on the revived publishing front, Professor Keith Sherwin's updated work on Human-powered Flight entitled Pedal Powered Planes is now available from ourselves or other booksellers at £8.95. Walk the Peak with Rod Dunn our new and spectacular photograpic celebration of the Peak, with fascinating route/natural history/climbing/history text by Rod arrived, weighed in at one and a quarter tons for the consignment, on Friday 30th. November, in time to make enlightened (i.e. rather few) outlets before Christmas. A beautiful large-format hardback at £19.99. Also now available, published as a slim buckram-bound volume in Morgan Green is The Collected Poems of Charles Morgan edited by Peter Holland, £12, while The Derbyshire Portway Pilgrimage to the Past by Stephen Bailey, in paperback at £6.95, should be available in June
As I update, the daffodils King Alfred in the windowboxes are still at their spectacular best; fully out for Easter and kept fresh by the cool, showery weather. The scarlet (or are they crimson?) Apeldoorn tulips are impatient to take their place. This last winter's experimental use of SNOWDROPS in the windowboxes looked great from INSIDE the shop, though hardly noticeable from outside; we shall certainly try them again.I think I will have to do a "Whimsies" feature on our rather individual windowbox policy.
At last a few NEW pictures, including Berlie
Doherty and Caroline Pitcher launching their new children's
books in the Cafe
Readers are strongly advised NOT to visit the bookshop before Friday 11th. January as then begins our annual sale, a very much living fossil of ye olde National Book Sale of the days of the Net Book Agreement. We are selling ALL new books at 10% off and all our second-hand books at 20% off, with the exception of our ABE/Website rare books, though we will be more than usually sympathetic to requests for discounts on these. P.S. LOTS of overstocks (mainly duplicates and shop-soiled) are 50-75% off. The sale continues untilincl ( a new word= USA "through") Sunday 27th. january.
We just managed to get the geraniums out of our windowboxes before the first 5 degree frost of Monday/Tuesday 10/11th. December, replacing them with this year's experiment in winter window flowers: SNOWDROPS.Today (8th. January) they are flowering delicately and look well from INSIDE the shop, though invisible from outside! Last year's experiment was Helleborus foetidus, with its cascading leaves and bright yellow-green flowers, a limestone plant that grows wild in the woods round here. It was very noticeable, but untidy and needing lots of water. Like HONESTY, which we put out between tulips and geraniums in the Spring, this species does not like being uprooted, even when grown in pots sunk into the ground. I think I will have to do a "Whimsies" feature on our rather individual windowbox policy.
In October a works outing visited the Metro Cinema, now at Derby University, to see AND WHEN DID YOU LAST SEE YOUR FATHER?, starring Jim Broadbent, Colin Firth and Juliet Stevenson, much of which was shot in and around Scarthin, with the Bookshop by no means invisible. We are only real these days when we are virtual! After a shaky start, the film proved gripping and moving.If you missed it, well, it seems to have vanished off the face of the earth; not really box-office, I suppose. It needs to do well at Cannes to reappear. Otherwise, we'll get the DVD.
BOOKS -what new among the old? A considerable collection on West African culture, history, language, peoples and agriculture is slowl being fed onto the shelves and onto AbeBooks. A shelf of paperback Pevsners appeared at the weekend and we are fighting off enormous Railway collections - perhaps TOO successfully.
Apple Day 2007 took place on Saturday 20th. October, a heavenly day, with an over-run on Sunday afternoon. For now, I'll leave the rest of the details as they were before the event; just change the tenses. See the Common Ground Website for what's on here and elsewhere try clicking on: Apple Day Events. This year, there will be several stalls, including Julian Brandram with some apple varieties to taste and discuss and Beano's Organic Produce. We are pleased to welcome a folk band, the Friday Night Group from Highfields School in Matlock, with their fiddle and flute jigs and reels. It is said that a "mystery shopper" from ( here it is again) Common Ground will be mingling with the crowd!