Desmond Elliott Prize for new writers winner announced

The winner of the £10,000 Desmond Elliott Prize for new writers was announced tonight as Ali Shaw's The Girl with Glass Feet, published by Atlantic Books at £7.99.

Shaw has worked as a bookseller and at the Bodleian Library, Oxford, but now is writing full-time. The plot, inspired by Kafka's Metamorphosis, follows a girl who is slowly turning to glass from the feet up.

The other two shortlisted books were Before the Earthquake by Maria Allen and Talk of the Town by Jacob Polley.

Heart of England Book Fair

Ibooknet members Peakirk Books and Simon French Books are attending the Heart of England Book Fair at the National Motorcycle Museum, Coventry Road, Bickenhill, Solihull, West Midlands B92 0EJ (J6 of M42) on Sunday 27th June.

Peakirk Books specialise in children and illustrated books including works by BB (Watkins-Pitchford). Biggs, Margaret. Breary, Nancy. Brent-Dyer, Elinor. Bruce, Dorita Fairlie. Blyton, Enid; Buckeridge, Anthony. Edwards, Monica. Forest, Antonia. Hill, Lorna. Johns, W.E. some Ladybirds ( pre 1980). Mallory, Clare. Martin, J.P. Mitchell, Gladys. Needham, Violet. Observers Books. Oxenham, E.J. Pardoe, Iris. Price, Evadne. Rae, G. Saville, Malcolm. Trevor, Elleston. Welch, Ronald.

Simon French Books specialise in Modern First Edition books, including many fine and signed titles for the discerning collector.

The book illustrating this post is from the stock of Peakirk Books:


Challenge for the Chalet School By Elinor Brent-Dyer

Publisher: London: Chambers, 1966

Seller ID: 69333

1st edition; Hbk in d/w; nice copy of book; school presentation plate inside; price clipped;Vg+/Vg;

Girls chalet school stories;

Price = 100.00 GBP

Nobel-winning author Jose Saramago dies

The 87 year old Portuguese novelist Jose Saramago has died. Best known for works such as Blindness and The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis (which won the PEN Award and the Independent Foreign Fiction Award) as well as the controversial The Gospel According to Jesus Christ.

You can read the New York Time Obituary here and an interview with Jose Saramago on The Guardian here.

Ibooknet member Simon French Books has a couple of nice first editions of Jose Saramago novels.

British Archaeology Awards

And yet another award – the British Archaeology Awards. There are nominations for a variety of categories, including Best Archaeological Project, Best Presentation of Archaeology in the Media, and Best Archaeological Discovery, I’ve listed these on my own blog. The nominations for Best Archaeological Book are:

• Britain's Oldest Art: The Ice Age Cave Art of Creswell Crags by Paul Bahn & Paul Pettitt
• Europe's Lost World: the re-discovery of Doggerland by Vince Gaffney, Simon Fitch & David Smith
• The Rose and The Globe, playhouses of Shakespeare's Bankside, Southwark: Excavations 1988-1991 by Julian Bowsher & Pat Miller

Royal Society Prize for Science Books

The longlist for this year's Royal Society Prize for Science Books - the world's most prestigious award for science writing - has been announced.

* We Need To Talk About Kelvin by Marcus Chown
* Why Does E=mc2? By Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw
* Why Evolution is True by Jerry A. Coyne
* In Search of the Multiverse by John Gribbin
* Everyday Practice of Science: Where Intuition and Passion Meet Objectivity and Logic by Frederick Grinnell
* God’s Philosophers: How the medieval world laid the foundations of modern science by James Hannam
* Storms of My Grandchildren by James Hansen
* Darwin’s Island: The Galapagos in the Garden of England by Steve Jones
* Life Ascending by Nick Lane
* The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World by Iain McGilchrist
* Complexity: A Guided Tour by Melanie Mitchell
* A World Without Ice by Henry Pollack

The judges on the judging panel are: Maggie Philbin, radio & television presenter (Chair); Professor Tim Birkhead, Fellow of the Royal Society; Tracy Chevalier, author; Robin Ince, stand-up comedian, writer & actor; Dr Janet Anders, Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Fellow.

The shortlist will be announced on 24th August 2010.

An Alternative World Cup Squad

If you keep hearing the name Defoe over the next few weeks and wonder what the author of Robinson Crusoe has done to get himself in the news then this take on the world cup might be the one for you.

Several Ibooknet members have books on South Africa (including South African fiction, history or politics). You can try the stock of Plurabelle Books, C L Hawley and Barter Books.

For Daniel Defoe or the eighteenth century novel try C L Hawley or Stella & Rose's Books.

The copy of Robinson Crusoe used to illustrate this post is from the stock of Stella & Rose's Books.

Easy Bookshelves for an Alcove

A solution for bookstorage in the older house by Philip Lund of Lund Theological Books

Lots of older British houses have chimney breasts in living rooms and bedrooms which look ideal for putting bookshelves in. At first glance it would seem simple to screw a few battens on the facing walls of the alcove and put some shelves across between them. However, anyone who has ever tried drilling into a brick wall knows how difficult it is to put in holes that are exactly at right angles to the surface, and lined up horizontally. Drill bits slip, they encounter hard material, they end up slightly in the wrong place. By the time you have made two holes for every batten, and put in two battens for each shelf, and have got half a dozen or more shelves fitted you will be very lucky to have a set of perfectly positioned horizontal shelves.

And I see lots of home-fitted shelving sagging under the weight of books because the shelves are too thin for the span between the walls.

The following suggestions have been used and modified by me over the years very successfully in most rooms of our house. The basic principle is that you don't screw the shelf battens to the wall, you screw them to a plank you've fixed as an upright to the wall. As putting screws into wood is a lot easier than drilling holes in walls the whole job is quicker and neater. Of course you still have to drill some holes, but not half as many as in the traditional method. Here's an example:



Click to continue reading Easy Bookshelves for an Alcove.