Been a little quiet on here recently. The reason is that we've been working away to make our virtual shop a reality. Just this morning we received and processed our first orders. Yes! It works! What is even more exciting is that this was all accomplished from the comfort of an armchair at home while I was drinking coffee and lounging around in a dressing-gown...

I LOVE COMPUTERS

Anyway let's wade in with a few of the usual oppinionated bookselling rants.

1: Waterstones have a new promotion at the moment that claims to be about remembering "classic" backlist titles such as Journey by Moonlight by Antal Szerb. What makes this so funny is that it is only Waterstones that has forgotten these titles - places such as Crockatt & Powell know these are the most important books - the core that sells year after year and stands apart from the whims of literary fashion. Those in charge of the big W really are dumb. No wonder Timmy wants his toys back!

2: Why is the Orange prize shortlist so bloody boring? The same books crop up again and again on the prize lists whilst the chance to highlight brilliant and really exciting books like Lorraine Adam's Harbor are lost.

Only two rants? Oh well, that will have to do...

I got my home phone bill yesterday. Itemised. And they were kind enough to list my top five numbers called. The usual suspects were there: my mother, my best mate. And there, leering at me from the number one slot, rubbing in my lack of life like Tiger Balm into a Sensitive Area, were my beloved employers, Crockatt & Powell. Yes, the number I have spent most money phoning in the past 30 days is 020 7928 0234. So not only is it automatically programmed into my Friends and Family, if I really wanted to save money I should set the number as my Best Friend. Work is my best friend. WORK.

Have I mentioned that I recently turned 30?

Well it had to happen I suppose what with us being approximately equidistant between the excellent Old Vic and his penthouse digs but C&P have finally broken their celebrity, a-list cherry. I won't reveal the Spacey book choices, suffice to say it was a very impressive selection. He should be back too as the number of loyalty stamps on his bookmark means he's only one purchase away from a free book!

This may also mean that Marie will insist on working saturdays...

Another delivery from America, which is always fun. In this one we got 'Adverbs', the new novel for adults by Daniel Handler, aka Lemony Snicket ('A Series of Unfortunate Events'). It's got a great comic strip cover, reminiscent of the McSwenney's graphic special, and once glance is all it takes to see that Handler hasn't toned down his sense of humour for so-called 'grown ups'. (I am thirty tomorrow and I'm not sure I've 'grown up' at all. Gradually, though, I do seem to be growing *out*.)

"Hello," reads the blurb on the inside jacket. "I am Daniel Handler, the author of this book. Did you know that authors often write the summaries that appear on their book's dust jacket? You might want to think about that the next time you read something like 'A dazzling page-turner, this novel shows an internationally acclaimed storyteller at the height of his astonishing powers'."

Quite.

This is an interview with the ceo of US giant Barnes and Noble:

Sure, Stephen Riggio, the chief executive of Barnes & Noble, is happy to discuss his company's sales. But unlike executives who speak only of margins and mergers, Mr. Riggio is equally eager to talk about the joys of books and the pleasures of a comfortable store.

With 799 retail locations, an extensive Web site and about 40,000 employees, Barnes & Noble is the world's largest bookseller. In addition to its popularity with shoppers, it has been prized by investors, too. In 2005, the company's shares rose more than 30 percent, and they are up about 5 percent so far this year.

Mr. Riggio recently discussed the book industry. Following are excerpts:

Q: Is this a good time to be selling books?

A: Reports of the book industry's demise have been greatly exaggerated over the last 20 years. And they've been unsupported by any sound research. The fact is the industry has never had a single year of sales decline. It's a stable business and it's resilient in the face of competition for people's time from TV, Internet and video games.

It's a good time to be in the book business. The heaviest book buyers are over 40 years old and that's the fastest-growing segment of the population. Education is booming in America. More Americans are earning college degrees. And there's a post-9/11 baby boomlet that is good for sales of children's books.

A bookstore is a place where we can really have relationships with people for their entire lives.

Q: Is there a future for e-books or podcasts of books?

A: It's a very, very tiny market. As the writer Paul Auster told me recently, the book is a perfect technology. If it were invented today, it would be revolutionary. It's user-friendly; it's portable. Books are relatively inexpensive. They have value as physical objects; they last a lifetime.

Not all books can be converted into digital forms — just think about illustrated books and children's books.

Q: Are books fairly priced?

A: Book prices increased much faster than other consumer goods in the late 90's. But prices have leveled off and there has been relatively little or no price inflation in the past few years. Books are relatively inexpensive — a good value when compared to other forms of entertainment. And they have value and people collect them.

Q: How dependent are you on blockbuster books?

A: Over the last two years, there has hardly been, in the adult hardcover category, a major blockbuster title. Yet we have had two good years. And that's because our strategy emphasizes a vast selection of backlist titles. Best sellers represent less than 5 percent of our sales.

We greatly benefit when books like "Harry Potter" and "The Da Vinci Code" and "The South Beach Diet" come out. Our business is very stable in the absence of these kinds of books, but when they come in, they bring lots of extra customers into the stores.

Q: Ninety percent of your sales are made in the stores. How important are sales via the Internet?

A: We see our Web site not just as an advertising vehicle, but as an online catalog. There was a recent study that found 47 percent of people who researched the product online then bought the product offline. And more people use merchant Web sites than search engines when looking for products. So we see the Web site and the stores as totally linked and customers see us as one company.

You could buy a product from Barnes & Noble online and return it to the store with peace of mind.

Q: How are your stores designed to attract shoppers?

A: We've created something unique in American retail: a store where you can enjoy spending leisure time. When was the last time you hung out at an office supply store? In hundreds of communities across America we have become the community cultural center.

Q: What coming books look like strong sellers?

A: I can't predict that for sure. But if we look out over the next two or three years, we will see another book from Dan Brown. We will see the last book in the "Harry Potter" series. And we will see many books revolving around the 2008 presidential election.

Well, we here at C&P corporate hq have been banging on about our independence in the face of high street dominance - our different selections, our speed of ordering, our web presence and our customer service and our support of the all important backlist over 'bestsellers' ('bestsellers represent less than 5% of our sales'!!! How long have we been going on about the ridiculous focus on frontlist 'bestsellers' in every high street store?) but reading the above we can only take our hats off to an attitude to bookselling that really is us down to a 'T'. Luckily, this is an attitude from what we can only describe as the enlightened American market. There is a lot more than 3000 miles of ocean that separates the book worlds of them and us and I'm guessing it's gonna be a while before our industry resembles anything like theirs.

In the meantime, I'm not interested in Global domination and I don't buy the notion that just because a bookshop is independently run it should be supported. There are only two types of booksellers. Good ones and bad ones. I've seen good corporate bookshops (B&N in LA springs to mind) and terrible independents (naming no names) which is why a scheme like this one just annoys me. I don't want people to support us just because there's only 3 of us who own and run the joint and we want their sympathy, I want them to come here because we're really good at what we do!! And if that means agreeing with the devil himself at Barnes and Noble then so be it.

Oh Woe!

Flashing Helmet's helmet has lost the lights...

Marie and I spotted they had vanished last week but it wasn't until yesterday that I had a chance to chat to him about it.

Seems that the lights "blew off" during recent strong winds.

"I chased 'em down the street but each time I almost 'ad 'em there was another gust blew 'em out of reach. After a while I just thought I can't be bothered with this and let 'em go...I've got me eye on one of them Army helmets. I've seen one down Woolworth Road with that webbing on it, you know? I reckon I could shove the lights in there..."

I love the internet...

Phone rings:

"Good morning Crockatt & Powell"

"Oh hello - I was wondering if you could help me to source some glowsticks..."

"Glowsticks?"

"Yeah, you know...for raves and that..."

"Er...I don't see how we can help...We're a bookshop."

"Oh (Hah Hah) sorry mate. I did a Google search and you guys came up..."

! ! ? ? ! !

Our fave American actress has been causing mayhem.

Go Girl! That Modine has walked past the shop so many times and never came in - you were great!

Pushed too hard? What a Wuss...

Ok there are no arse jokes in this post so if that's what you're here for give up now...

Still here? Good.

I posted a while back about Mary Butts but that was before I had read much of the book we have in stock - The Taverner Novels. (There are in fact two novels in a single volume - Armed With Madness and the Death of Felicity Taverner.)

I often get a feeling about books though and I knew it was a goodie right away. Now, having just finished Armed With Madness, I can safely say that Mary Butts is my new favourite writer.

The more I find out about her (several of her books are illustrated by Jean Cocteau who she hung out in Paris with in the 1920's - ages before Colette was on the scene. There is a brilliant description of her "the gentle-born roisterer who wore a single dollar-sized white jade earing under a man's felt hat tipped-up, who "toddled" because one of her knees came easily out of joint, and who revelled in the pub-crawl.") the more I think I would have liked her...

She was also hated by Virginia Woolf - a fine writer - but can you imagine HER in the pub? What a bore!

Yep - sounds like Ms Butts was a bit of a nut but what a writer. Armed With Madness is heavily affected by TS Eliot's The Waste Land. Her characters have survived the War physically (but not always mentally) and are trying to begin to live in a new world - a place without God or any of the certainties that used to underpin society. Instead we have a group of young people in an old house in the country trying to find something, anything really, that seems real and of value.

In many ways Butts is also a visionary writer, appropriate as she was the great-granddaughter of local author (Eat THAT BSTTS!) William Blake's patron. She writes in a manner which is peculiar to say the least but that makes more sense when placed in context - modernism, Freud, Woolf et al, TS Eliot etc.

"He grinned at the old nurse's horror-story, went back to the studio and watered one of the shallow pans stuck with the seeds he had gathered tramping Europe. A bee-orchid had come up: an odd-scented herb from a pass on the Pyranees: a rare lily was over. Whenever he touched it life grew. Plants and dogs and children. Eggs hatched. And men? They were there to make him laugh. If they found rest in him, he was indifferent as Nature, and in general as kind."

Her writing is like poetry in that it avoids any attempt to be specific, to trap meaning in a cage of words. Instead she lets meanings leak out...

Behind all her writing I sense an allegorical, symbolic world, like Blake's personal mythology. This world, more real to her than the physical world, was populated with spirits and other wonders. It is glimpses of this vision that the reader sees while immersed in her prose.

Mary Butts died tragically young and her party-animal image tended to eclipse what she wrote though while she was alive she was an important and respected player in the British modernist scene.

Seekers seek her out!

On the table at Crockatt & Powell, always a little different...

We got an e-mail from Scott Pack this weekend - remember him? Former chief whatever of whateverstones, chicken-lover, embodiment of evil, etc etc. Regular readers have probably have been missing him as much as we have. For what is James Bond without Scaramanga, Penelope Pitstop without The Hooded Claw, Harry Potter without - well I don't know, we don't read Harry Potter in this shop. Whoever his enemy is. Anyway it would seem that our erstwhile nemesis has got himself a new, disappointingly un-evil job, with this apparently innocuous independent publisher. But look more closely: it's a publisher of books *adapted from websites*. Yes, it would seem that Mr Pack, not content with his former dominion of the entire book-buying universe, now seeks to control the internet. And he thought he could sneak that one past us! It won't happen, Pack-man! The Crockatt & Powell blog will remain forever independent! (Unless you want to turn it into a book that is. Call my people, let's talk.) OK, it is true that the exact levels of evil of the so-called "Friday Project" have yet to be discerned, so in the meantime, Scott, who is taking over from you at the chain who must not be named? We need to start hating them ASAP, just to maintain continuity.

Just had someone in dropping off info about a new production of Don Delillo's second play - Valparaiso.

Evidently the director just phoned up Delillo and asked if he could put on the production - Delillo said YES.

That's our kind of director and the production sounds great too.

It's on at the Red Lion theatre pub in Angel from 25th April until 13th May.

Words of wisdom from Raymond Chandler's famous sleuth can be found in Philip Marlowe's Guide To Life, a great little HB piled on the till at a lovely bookshop near you (if you live in South East London anyway)

On Coffee:

I went out to the kitchen to make coffee - yards of coffee. Rich, strong, bitter, boiling hot, ruthless, depraved. The life-blood of tired men.

On Grammar:

"He coulda, went somewhere without telling me," he mused.
"Your grammar," I said, "is almost as loose as your toupee."

On TS Eliot

"'I grow old...I grow old...I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.' What does that mean, Mr Marlowe?"

"Not a bloody thing. It just sounds good."

He smiled. "That is from 'THe Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock.' Here's another one. 'In the room the women come and go / Talking of Michael Angelo.' Does that suggest anything to you sir?"

"Yeah - it suggests to me that the guy didn't know very much about women."

I love getting deliveries from America. It's a little bit like Christmas each time. Even though we ordered the books, we're never quite sure what's going to come out of the box, mainly because the American editions look so different from our own - they even have a different texture. (Smell the same, though.) Today amongst other things we got two lovely first edition David Mitchells, a clutch of different novels with quite similar sage green covers (sage green is obviously big in US publishing at the moment), and two William Maxwell-related titles: one collection of essays about him, and one short story collection by Zona Gale. Who she, you cry. Until last week I didn't know either. She - alongside her intellectual contemporaries Edith Wharton and Willa Cather - was a strong influence on William Maxwell's writing, and hugely successful in her own 1920s heyday, only to be, as with so many others, completely forgotten now. I find her particularly intriguing as she was a proto-feminist writer who adapted some of her own work, including "Miss Lulu Bett" - the title story of this particular collection - into screenplays for silent movies. "Incomparable", says a quote on the cover. "Without flaw" reads another. I don't need more convincing to have a peruse. And so can you - watch out for its (yes) sage green appearance on C&P's selections table.

This month we had some problems with chosing a book of the month.

We wanted to pick The Observations by Jane Harris, an excellent romp of a read written in a distinctive style by a new author of obvious talent. We were fine with this choice even when it became clear Winklestones et al were also going to be highlighting it. Our plan was to slash the cover price to £9.99 in line with the chains. This strategy enabled us to sell loads of The Night Watch despite the chains also selling it at £12.99. It made it clear (if anyone had to spell it out!) how discounting affected our business. Without cutting the cover price we would not have sold anywhere near the number of copies we eventually reached. (At one point 1% of national sales - an astonishing feat for a new shop!)

Then we realised that the supermarkets were also going to be pushing The Observations and that takes things into a region where we have no chance to compete. To sell at a good price we would have to lose money - something we cannot afford to do. The supermarkets can afford to lose money on a few key titles as it draws people into their stores where they are seduced by a range of other apparently cheap goods and services. That supermarkets make such large profits should make it obvious that someone somewhere is losing out - either their suppliers who are forced to sell at rock bottom prices, the environment (as out of season vegetables are flown around the globe), or the customers who end up eating bad meat and junk food loaded with extra salt and sugar.

So we had to abandon The Observations with deep regret as it is a stonking read. Why highlight something that everyone else was drawing attention to and able to sell at a cheaper price? (We are still selling it though so those who judge on criteria other than price alone CAN support their local bookshop.)

But we were left with a substantial problem. Book of the month for April. Hmmm.

The solution presented itself in two seperate incidents. Time Will Darken It had been on our table for a couple of weeks. It was there because, despite not having read the book, I knew it was good. I have a number of trusted reading friends and all spoke highly of Maxwell and this book in particular.

A bookgroupie bought the book and then tried to presuade the book group to read it. (Thanks Jane!) Her passionate plug for the book reminded me how long I had been meaning to read it. Then Jane Adams, our favourite and quite famous acting buddy (soon to return to the states - Oh No!) who had also come across Maxwell on our table came back and raved about it...

Two rave responses in as many weeks. I took a copy home myself. WOW! I was blown away. This is the real shit I kept thinking, really good writing about ordinary people in ordinary situations. There were several moments where I had to stop and re-read passages that expressed so beautifully things I had felt myself and yet failed to articulate. The subtlety of the storytelling, the refusal to make anything simple, the brilliance of the final third of the book that meant I literally COULD NOT PUT IT DOWN convinced me that here was a perfect book for Book of the Month.

But it wasn't new!

When I phoned the publishers they were amazed. Why do you want to put that in the window? Eventually they were swayed and now there it is...waiting for readers...

The point?

There are two...

1: In our quest to bring good books to wider attention we are NOT as arrogant as you might think. We listen to our customers and learn from them. Good books. That's what we want and we need YOU to help us in our search.

2: A good book will always be a good book. The publishing industry is obsessed (as is so much of our society) with the search for NEW things. At Crockatt & Powell we don't care if a book is new or old. What we want are books that people respond to and will be pleased to have read.

So come and give William Maxwell a try. Just one among hundreds of great books on the shelves of Crockatt & Powell. Oh, and if there's a writer you don't see but think is great let us know!

A future Book of the Month might be discovered...

Ok Ok Ok so there it is - The Crockatt&PowellMobile (like the batmobile but with less sophisticated weaponry) blatantly breaking the law in glorious technicolour.

I hate people that drive in bus lanes!

That was me!

When did I do that?

The worst thing about our wonderful surveillance society is that the way they catch you is SO beautifully bureaucratic.

The letter in the post.

The kafkaesque phone calls where only machines will speak to you.

The eventual capitulation in the face of hard evidence.

The questions on the website that assume you know what a PCN is (Penalty Charge Notice) or a VRN (Vehicle Registration Number) that ask, after you have paid £50 if you would like to ADD MORE. (Who ticks yes? - Change your shopping cart software Lambeth)

The option to pay by Switch after an advertising campaign of irritating penguins has been busy telling us for what seems like a million years that Switch is now Maestro...

We have had a few logistical problems with April.

As a result April will now be starting tomorrow (at C & P anyway)

We are THAT independent.

The book of the month is worth the wait though...

An editorial in the guardian on books eh?

Key line - Independent booksellers cannot compete on price, though they often make up for it by being more interesting places to go.

No doubt that C & P is a more interesting place to shop than Tesco, Asda, Waterstinks, Bored or even my own bedroom but I also think we're good value.

Ok so our book of the month this month had to change when we realised our choice (a good one if we say so ourselves) had also been chosen by all the big players above mentioned meaning we had to change it to...NOT TELLING - Find out next week - it's going to rock...

But yes - we are also good value. Bestsellers, Wayne Roony Books, New Stuff - OK the net and the big guys cane us by milking the economies of scale. (YAWN!)

Most other stuff we are no more expensive. That's right. A backlist PB from C & P £7.99, also £7.99 in Waterstinks (won't have it at ASDA) From Amazon it will be cheaper but not when you factor in the postage. And have you ever tried to browse on Amazon? Exactly. We are also faster than Amazon in 90% of cases...

So come and check us out. Interesting AND good value.

And Marie!