What a boast! MOST enjoyable?? MOST BOASTFUL perhaps! The earlier motto was:
and this remains accurate. What we seem to be specialising in is SURVIVING, and we can only survive in this beautiful but congested and hidden place because we do try to offer the "Compleat" bookshop experience, despite the fact that, according to an old friend, Brian MacDonald
Actually how Scarthin Books really operates can now be read in verse by clicking on WHIMSIES and reading the Ballad of Scarthin Books or our authoratitive article The Ecology of Books.
OR you could ask the opinion of GUARDIAN UNLIMITED for which we extend our appreciation of being included in such a short-list.
So,welcome to Scarthin Books, a sort of One Stop Bookshop. People always ask what we "specialise" in,and the answer can also be in DIVERSITY. We are a major stockist of new books, with some forty thousand carefully chosen titles on the shelf and an efficient and very resourceful international ordering service for individuals, schools and institutions. We buy and sell second hand and antiquarian books, with a stock of about 45,000 on the shelf and with rapidly growing worldwide sales via a net stock of over 3000 volumes. We just about keep in order a considerable range of second hand sheet music, recently (December 3rd.'07) put straight and enormounsly augmented by our scholarly Edmund. We also boast a homely cafe with many curious exhibits on almost the only un-booked walls in the building and a children's book room. We are publishers of books on Derbyshire, local history and the popular Family Walks series.
We have finally fallen into the e-well, so e-mails, to clare@scarthinbooks.com are now as welcome or unwelcome as letters, faxes, phone-calls and ansaphone recordings. Barring mishaps, ALL messages will be answered, orders quickest of all, publishing enquiries slowest of all, offers of books usually within a day or two (the river of books is always in spate here, "for rain has been falling far off at their fountains"). We are now supplying virtually all new books priced at £19.95 or over at 10% off (or more, if subjects of "special offers")
We like to link to other interesting pages, particularly literary, scientific, ecological and thought-provoking – as well as to other small businesses providing services which are useful or local or singular or run by friends/relatives - or all of these!
At last a few NEW pictures, includingBerlie Doherty and Caroline Pitcher launching their new children's books in the Cafe
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 today's 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.
Last 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. You can always get the DVD.
About 100 second-hand, but almost immaculate, modern musical biographies and studies of THE BLUES have arrived to zazz up our jazz section. Last seen stacked on the Chaize Longue in the Old Baldies' Room (Railways,Canals, Buses, Architecture). Also hidden in various settles are stacks of 1940's/1950's SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINES. Ring (01629-823272) or e-mail clare@scarthinbooks.com first if you want to look at these. What else ... lots of lovely, recent Folio Society at VERY tempting prices, a collection on Watercolour Painting (how to do it), with a large DERBYSHIRE collection in the offing...oh, and a solitary volume from the Golden Cockerell Press stands out from among a continuing healthy imput of fine and antiquarian volumes...not to mention James Bond (we recently sold his book on The Birds of the West Indies) and Conan the Conqueror.
Apple Day 2008 is likely to take place here on Saturday 18th. October. Will it yet again be a day of typically British heavenly weather (see "BREWUP" under "Whimsies" on this site),but check with us first or click on: Apple Day Events for the national picture. For related info, also try Julian Brandram on apple varieties and Beano's Organic Produce.Last year, as a change from the splendours of Morris Men we welcomed a folk band, the Friday Night Group from Highfields School in Matlock, with their fiddle and flute jigs and reels.
Satisfying, isn't it when you are struck by a notion that is both blindingly obviously true, but has (apparently) struck no-one else before. Such, it seems, is the above observation of an experience which surely we all have in common! But perhaps Google is not yet the perfect test of originality.You thought of it first! At POETRY READINGS, people just do not know what to do with their eyes.You look at the ground, in the air, close your eyes, anything to avoid looking AT the speaker while you squirm. Contrast this with listening to live music, even if it's pretty bad. You are either relaxed with a pint, trying to talk with your friends over the racket, or you are visually summing up the band, or even devouring the singer with your eyes! At a gig, there is no requirement to pretend that something solemn and holy is happening, you won't offend anyone by leaving.STORYTELLING suffers from a related syndrome, because storytelling is holy too. You MUST BE ENJOYING this revival of the ethnic human aural tradition! Well, SOMETIMES storytelling is really funny, unexpected, moving or elating - but often it is not, and you must (in this case) keep staring at the speaker with an ecstatic grin on your face - THE STRAIN! So I hide from poetry readings and storytelling - would you like to put an event on at the Bookshop, just e-mail us!
DID WE DO WRONG? THE LIBRARY OF SAWN-OFF BOOKS
describes one of our more recent commissions, which you may find amusing or, perhaps, outraging.
-or for a more comprehensive rethink of the Book Trade, try clicking on The Ecology of Books
Our current mini-exhibition, banished to the Old Baldies' Room over the Christmas, New Year and Book-sale seasons, is of fifty years of the Sheefield Clarion Ramblers' Handbooks, edited by G.H.B.Ward. See Micro Exhibitions for more details of this (when I've written the blurb) and previous displays, or best of all, visit us!
.Our ONLINE ORDERING SERVICE is at
www.scarthinbooksonline.co.uk
.