The Aardvark Blog

Quiet before the storm
24/03/2014

We have several large consignments of new books - covering art, history, Folio Society etc - coming into stock over the next month, but at the moment we are in a slight lull, during which time we can catch up on some of the piles of books that we have bought over the last few years and never had time to process.

Once books get into the warehouse it is amazing how often other books start to arrive and stop you from dealing with the earlier books. Several superb illustrated books have been found over the last week, some nice editions of the work of Henry James, and countless novels from the first half of the last century. I think it would be fair to say that we have got better over the last few years at processing books when we buy them, but with greater efficiency comes the loss of the joy that comes from finding a box of really superb books that has been hiding undiscovered in the depths of the warehouse.

At the moment we are selling lots of copies of Michal Faber's Under the Skin, the new found popularity of the book not unconnected with the new film starring Scarlet Johanssen. This reminds me of something that happened some years back, when we landed up with the only 50 copies of the key  book by  the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. What had been the deadest of dead stock, suddenly rushed off our shelves at £16 per copy. At such times one is reminded of William Goldman's famous dictum about the movie business that Nobody knows anything.