Reeve & McIntyre Big Up Bookshops 5: The Bridge Bookshop, Isle of Man

Kevin felt as a Trifle Confused as he began the next stage of his epic bookshop tour. According to the large red dot on his map, the Bridge Bookshop was in the middle of the Irish Sea!

Kevin guessed it must be one of those floating bookshops, or maybe the Bridge in its name referred to the bridge of a large container ship? But it turned out that the large red dot was hiding a large green island called the Isle of Man. But Kevin was still a Trifle Confused because the island had not one but TWO Bridge Bookshops, one in Port Erin and one in Ramsey. But the Port Erin branch had a mermaid taking a bath in one of the planters outside, so Kevin decided to visit that one.

“Good choice!” said the mermaid. “All the mermaids come here for books and baths, and bath-books.”

Kevin went inside, where he met bookseller Angela Pickard.

Kevin: What is the best thing about being a bookseller?

Angela: Talking about books to all our lovely customers and hearing a happy review when a recommended book is loved.

Kevin: What’s one way you’ve tackled a problem that your bookshop has faced during the pandemic?

Angela: We have been offering free delivery to Isle of Man addresses (over £20).

Kevin: What are three books you absolutely love hand-selling to customers?

Angela: Cakes in Space, Mortal Engines…

Kevin: I’ve never heard of them.

Angela: …and errm, Brian Bilston's Diary of a Somebody.

Kevin: Who is your favourite children’s book illustrator? (Other than Reeve & McIntyre…)

Angela: Emily Sutton

Kevin: What is your favourite biscuit?

Angela: Chocolate Digestive

(A long pause, while imaginary chocolate digestives dance around Kevin’s head like an angelic choir.)

Kevin: What is the best way for people to buy books from you if they can’t visit the shop in person?

Angela: Visit our website, https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/bridgebookshop

And the Bridge Bookshop have very kindly made a whole, dedicated Reeve & McIntyre page on their Bookshop.org page - here's a link!

Comments

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

Station Zero

Search This Blog