Economics and I do not mix. The New York Times tells me that economist John Maynard Keynes is back in fashion again. Maynard Keynes preached that government intervention could spark a sluggish economy - eg he invented the bail out so the folks at Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley should be mighty grateful for his efforts.
The only thing I know about Maynard Keynes is he’s mentioned in the Deacon Blue song, A Ship Called Dignity so I’m probably not an expert on economic theory although my knowledge of popular culture trivia is second to none. First editions of Maynard Keynes’ most famous book, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, would make a very nice bonus for someone at AIG or one of those other slimeball banks.
Next week, I’m heading home to the UK for the first time in a year and a half and high streets might look a little different from my last visit. According to a very scary business story in The Times, one in 10 of all shops in Britain have closed in the past nine months and independent bookshops have been hit particularly hard.
The next J.K. Rowling is an Australian kitchen saleswoman says the Wall Street Journal. C’mon, journalists should know better than this. How many next J.K. Rowlings have we seen over the past five years?
1. Any Amount of Books on Charing Cross Road, London
2. Barter Books, Alnwick Station, Northumberland
3. Bath Old Books in Bath, Somerset
4. Gresham Books, Crewkerne, Somerset
5. Scarthin Books in Cromford, Derbyshire
6. Scriveners in Buxton, Derbyshire
7. The Book Shop in Wigtown, Dumfries and Galloway, Scotland
8. The Haunted Bookshop in Cambridge
9. Wenlock Books in Much Wenlock, Shropshire
10. Westwood Books in Sedbergh, Cumbria
I’ve driven past Gresham Books in Crewkerne so many times… and never stopped to go in. Shame on me!
Nicholas Clee recounts the history of the paperback in The Times. He explains how Allen Lane, the founder of Penguin, didn’t invent them but popularised the format in the face of disbelief from the rest of the publishing industry. Back in 1935, publishers was resistant to change and stuck in the mud. And in 2009, it’s….oh.
Marketing Week Magazine in the UK analyses the market for secondhand goods - a market that, frankly, is dominated by books. The writer doesn’t truly understand what makes the used book market tick - there is no mention about how secondhand booksellers often supply products (books) that are not available in new condition. To understand the used book business, you need to grasp how books go out-of-print and they are going out of print very quickly these days because publishers are not keen to hold on to ‘backlist’ titles for too long.
If you wanted to go deeper into the secondhand book market, you’d analyse the food chain of booksellers - $1 booksellers with huge warehouses (all online), remainder sellers (online & wholesale), charity sellers (online and bricks and mortar), general used bookstores (who are mostly online too), specialist used bookshops (nearly always online as well), purely online sellers often operating from home and sometimes with a storage facility, and high-end rare and antiquarian sellers with upmarket shops (usually online too). And I’m just skimming over the surface here.
Mezrich defends himself saying, “It’s a non-fiction book. It’s a true story. I am a narrative non-fiction writer in a way that other people don’t write. I’m trying to create my own genre of non- fiction.”
FaceBook’s spokesman counters, “Ben Mezrich clearly aspires to be the Jackie Collins or Danielle Steele of Silicon Valley.”
Mezrich is insistant that he followed standard journalistic practice yet he apparently didn’t interview Mark Zukerberg, the founder of FaceBook. Critics also say thta Mezrich doesn’t properly explain how Zuckerberg transformed from a somewhat anti-social student to a huge internet success.
Ben Mezrich speaks with Bloomberg about The Accidental Billionaires:
Yesterday’s Telegraph ran a great article about Brian Rafferty who runs the Broughton Street Book Shop in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Brian presents customers with a pamphlet that reads:
“With the help of my family and friends I have opened this second-hand bookshop and intend to support myself, and give a purpose to my life. I don’t think I am unemployable.”
You see, Brian suffers from Aspberger’s syndrome and cerebral palsy which, despite qualifications and good a good work ethic, seems to have prevented Brian from getting a job, or even an interview for that matter.
To set Brian up in the bookshop, his family sent out requests to friends for donations of books. The family was deluged with books and the shop opened in March of this year. (A portion of the profits from the bookshop is donated to the National Autistic Society.)
“The shop means a lot to me,” Brian says. “I can’t get a job but I want to do something useful with my time. I love it when people come in to buy a book and stop for a chat, I’ve made quite a few new friends.“
The loss of a great beer is a tragedy - and it’s even more tragic that I haven’t tried Thomas Hardy’s Ale and soon it could be no more. Damn this economy!
Beer devotees have hailed the ale as one of the world’s best but English brewery O’Hanlon has had to plug the keg citing the time and money it took to produce the liquid gold made it a necessary decision. The packaging itself is time consuming as each bottle is individually numbered, is topped with gold foil and has a hand-hung gold medallion.
Thomas Hardy’s Ale was created 41 years ago by brewer Eldridge Pope as a tribute to the author.
A quest is on to find another brewery to produce the beer so it’s not a hopeless situation yet. But just in case, grab a bottle of Thomas Hardy’s Ale for one hand and a copy of Tess of the d’Urbervilles for the other and toast good old Hardy himself.
The latest writer to be interviewed by AbeBooks is Jeff Rubin - author of Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller. Rubin, one of North America’s leading economists, explains how globalization is coming to an end as the world faces up to a dwindling and increasingly expensive supply of oil. He explains how the modern world has been built on cheap oil and how it’s going to change radically under high priced oil.
I initially feared this book would be very boring, but it’s extremely readable. Like most people, I equate the price of oil to the price I pay at the pump when I fill up my car. In reality, the price of almost everything in our global economy is influenced by oil and its price. We’ve spent three decades marvelling at global business and now, according to Rubin, it’s going to implode.
Hello, my American cousins - the British pound is struggling against the US dollar so we have put together a page to help our Stateside buyers take advantage of this situation. Of course, we have the UK’s finest rare booksellers listing with us so the selection is fantastic.
An article in The London Free Press takes a look at the people behind some of the bookstores in London, Ontario and how far some of them go to get books into the hands of book lovers. (Featured bookshops include AbeBooks booksellers H Sommers Books and Attic Books!)
The book, which won Silver in the 2008 Axiom Business Book Awards — Business Ethics category and is a finalist for the 2009 National Business Book Award, takes a look at the concept of debt as a thematic element of religion, literature and human society.
From The New York Times Politics Blog The Caucus comes a list of bestselling political books based on sales for Dec. 27 through Jan. 17, 2009. No prizes for guessing who dominates the list!
In the death of an institution, or as the BBC called it the end of an era, Woolworths became one of the major casualties of the current recession. The chain planted its roots in the late 1800s in the US and eventually opened its first UK stores in 1909. In 1910 Frank Woolworth, the company’s founder, commissioned the construction of The Woolworth Building in New York City. The building was the tallest in the world until 1930 and continues to be one of the 20 tallest in the city of NY to this day; There was even a limited edition book published in 1913 discribing its splender, called The Woolworth Building.
The company became a staple in both nations and there was even a movie with novelization, The Girl from Woolworths, that came out in 1929. The chain thrived, acquired, and expanded until the 1980s and 90s when it came upon tough times and began closing its North American stores, selling off the Canadian outlets to Wal-Mart and closing its US stores to concentrate on its subsidiary Footlocker.
For a company to last over 100 years is an amazing feat, and there are numerous books documenting its history … but I think these two I mentioned are two of the most interesting.
The only thing I know about Maynard Keynes is he’s mentioned in the Deacon Blue song, A Ship Called Dignity so I’m probably not an expert on economic theory although my knowledge of popular culture trivia is second to none. First editions of Maynard Keynes’ most famous book, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, would make a very nice bonus for someone at AIG or one of those other slimeball banks.
The latest writer to be interviewed by AbeBooks is Jeff Rubin - author of 
