Bookplates for Christmas

The author Holly Bourne has come up with a neat way for authors to support indie bookshops this Christmas, in a year when those shops have been forced to shut for months on end and even more business than usual has been going to the online giants. Holly is encouraging authors and illustrators to supply free, signed bookplates to any customers who purchase one of their books from an independent bookshop. If you check the #SignForOurBookshops hashtag on Twitter you'll find a lot of big names have already pledged their support, so if you're planning to give books as presents, or just buy a big old stack of them for yourself, this is a nice way to personalise them.

Naturally Sarah McIntyre and I wanted to get involved, so Sarah has designed 100 exclusive Reeve&McIntyre bookplates. They feature Kevin, the roly-poly hero of The Legend of Kevin, Kevin's Great Escape and Kevin and the Biscuit Bandit, but all our characters share the same universe so they'll look just fine in any of our earlier books too. If you'd like one, and you're in the UK, all you have to do is send me a message in the comments below or as a Direct Message on Twitter - which might be best, as I'll need your postal address (I'll open my Twitter DMs for the duration so we won't need to follow each other). Send me proof that you've purchased one of our books from an independent bookshop (or a UK high street chain like Waterstone's, Blackwells, or Daunts - anywhere but the big A, basically) and I'll send you a bookplate. It may take a while, as I only really go near a post box about once a week at the moment, and I'll be using second class stamps - so get in early if you want to be sure of bookplates by Christmas!

I also have 100 blank bookplates which I'll happily sign, dedicate, and scribble small doodles on for anyone who wants to stick them in a copy of Mortal Engines, Railhead, or another of my solo books: all the same rules apply.

If, like me, you live a fair way from your nearest bookshop, or it isn't able to supply books during the present emergency, there's a new way to support them online via bookshop.org Most of my local bookshops have a page on there, and if you buy a book through their page a cut of the profits goes to them - it's probably not as good as shopping with them in person, but it's definitely better than nothing. (I've also set up my own page there, which is a useful thing to link to while I wait for my new website to be built, but you'll probably want to support your own favourite bookshop.)

So: 100 Reeve & McIntyre bookplates, 100 blanks, Twitter DM or leave a message below. First come, first served, and sadly I'll have to restrict it to the UK.

Lord of the Rings 7: Minas Tirith

'This is not a work which many adults will read through more than once,' claimed the historical novelist Alfred Duggan, reviewing The Lord of the Rings when it was published. But I've read it through LOADS of times and now I'm blogging my latest re-read, so what did he know? And so we come to Minas Tirith, Tower of Guard, citadel of Gondor, seven tiers of fancy white fortifications built against a buttress of Mount Mindolluin, with the Tower of Ecthelion rising a thousand feet above the plain. It seems to me the template on which a whole genre of knock-off fantasy cities has been based - I guess Robert E Howard and people wrote about such places before Tolkien, and perhaps there were cities of equal grandeur on Barsoom, but when concept art threads on Instagram throw up unlikely gold and marble castles built on mountaintops and over waterfalls they always look distinctly Minas Tirithy to me. I'm wondering now if London in Mortal Engines was subconsciously echoin

Thunder City

This September Scholastic will be publishing my new novel set in the world of Mortal Engines . Here’s the cover, created (like all the others in the series) by Ian McQue . The rule I set for myself when I was writing this one was that it shouldn’t feature any of the people or places from previous Mortal Engines books. So Thunder Cit y takes place just over a century before the original book, when the town-eat-town world of Traction Cities is slightly less ruthless than it will become later, and none of the characters from the original quartet has even been born yet. (I suppose Mr Shrike must be bimbling about somewhere, but he’s still just yer basic implacable killing machine at this point so there’s not much point in paying him a visit). So hopefully this new take will be accessible to people who’ve never read Mortal Engines , and hopefully people who have read it will enjoy an adventure set in the same world. My pen and ink drawing of the Traction City of Thorbury, after a painti

Railhead A-Z

In order to save my website it became necessary to destroy it. Before I pulled the plug I rescued the longest post on my old blog. Here it is, like the lone survivor of a shipwreck: my A-Z guide to the ideas behind my novel Railhead. At the time it was written, Railhead had just been published. I'll be putting up some posts about the sequels, Black Light Express and Station Zero , in the coming days. Railhead cover art by Ian McQue A is for Alternative Forms of Transport ‘What I need,’ I thought, when I’d been struggling on and off for a few years with my space epic (working title, ‘Space Epic’) ‘is an alternative to spaceships…’ I’ve always enjoyed space stories. I first started reading science fiction back in 1977, when the original Star Wars film made me realise that outer space could be just as good a backdrop for fantasy as Tolkien-esque worlds of myth and legend. (Actually, I didn’t see Star Wars until 1978, but its bow-wave of publicity hit these shores the p

Emma PH said…

What a fabulous idea. I’ve just bought a book from Blackwells but sadly not one of yours as I have them all! I might need to rebuy something as I’d really like a Railhead bookplate. Great series of books ❤️ I hope this really helps book shops. Kindest regards Emma Phillips Harrington

12 November 2020 at 10:05

philip reeve said…

Thanks, Emma... Sorry, I only just saw this reply (so Twitter DMs work better, if you're on there... Also, of course, you don't want to put your address on here). Drop me a line, I'm sure we can sort something out.

20 November 2020 at 09:54

Station Zero

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