Today’s
Compass Points has a resolutely optimistic tone! We will be bringing you the
books both humorous and useful that we think could sell well in these
extraordinary times, and also a miscellany of cheering music! Here
is the Booksellers Association page with lots of coronavirus information for
booksellers, it contains useful links with advice and business support, as well
as help with mental health and wellbeing. The book trade has pulled together to
launch a series of emergency measures to support authors and booksellers
affected financially, and you can find out more about that here.
This
is from Books from Scotland: a one stop page advising on the plans of bookshops
around Scotland as they react to the crisis.
For everyone who can’t get hold of
handwash, Homemade Soap by Tatyana Hill (£8.00, hb, 978 0754834335) will show you how to make
twenty all-natural pure and fragrant soaps to use instead! Lavender and olive
oil, honey and oatmeal, cinnamon and orange are just some of the natural
ingredients that can be used in this an age-old craft that makes the perfect
task for self-isolation. It’s simple, rewarding and fun, and at the end you
have produced something genuinely useful! Clear step-by-step instructions and
photographs take you through each stage of the soap-making process. It’s
published by Lorenz and you can flip through its pages here.
One activity that many will be doing as
they socially distance, is going for lots of long solitary walks and the ideal publisher
for that is Wild Things. Wild Running: Britain's 200 Greatest Trail Runs
(pb, £16.99, 978 1910636152), Islandeering (£16.99, pb, 978 1910636176), and
Scottish Bothy Walks (£16.99, pb, 978 1910636190) are all full of great
suggestions for getting away from other people. And if you just want to sit on
the sofa and plan adventures a little further afield from home, then Wild Things
are the perfect publisher for that too, with their gorgeous guides to all those
places in the world we’ll be able to go again once the virus has been
vanquished. Have a look at their website here for more inspo!
Uplifting Song Number 1. Hey, we can still get drunk, and we can
still haver (what even is that?) and as long as we keep our distance, we can
still Walk 500 Miles!
A title that could come in very handy
for many families right now is The Board Game Family
(£12.99, pb, 978 1785834332), which shows board gaming can be integrated into
family life and is filled with irresistible ways to engage even the trickiest
of teenagers and manage social isolation with flair. Ellie Dix shares useful tips on
the practicalities of getting started and how to go about cultivating the right
mindset and a healthy culture of competition. It presents parents with guidance
on how they can build a consensus with their children around establishing a set
of house rules that ensure fair play and eloquently explains how playing board
games together can strengthen relationships and ensure that spending all that
extra time together will be a pleasure not a pain.
Hurrah for the wonderful Comma,
who this week were announced as regional winner for the North of England for
the Small Press of the Year in the Nibbies.
The full announcement is in the Bookseller here.
Richly deserved, 2019 has been the most successful year to date for Comma, they
launched their acclaimed podcast, and published two debut collections in
translation. In in other prize news, the Comma Press Podcast was highly
commended in the UK Book Blog Awards by the judges, who said 'this indie, literary
podcast produces above its cloud. It's only the beginning, and we are excited
to hear more.' Here’s to an equally successful 2020 and congrats guys – we
love you!
The Bookseller reports today
that indies across the country are closing their doors to protect staff and
customers and encouraging customers to support their businesses and place
orders online. But Waterstone’s boss James Daunt says the coronavirus
crisis has led to ‘unprecedented demand for books’ and has called for ‘all
bookshops to be kept open to meet a social need.' BA MD Meryl Halls said: ‘We
want to remind consumers that they can still use their local bookshop to buy
books even if they are practising social distancing. We are very keen for
publishers and authors to help reinforce the message not to default to Amazon
as the de facto buying option, but to link to bookshops and to reiterate the
importance of shopping locally, supporting their local community.’ You can
read more on that story here. A shout out to the Newham Bookshop
who although closed to the public, are now running a delivery service to those
who are vulnerable or self-isolating with the help of a network of cycling
volunteers. Vivian Archer, who co-runs the bookshop with John Newham
believes the momentum is down to ‘the community support we have, and that’s
what the shop has been built on.’ You can read more on that one here.
Amber
are relaunching Preparing to Survive: Being Ready For
When Disaster Strikes (pb, £12.99,
978 1838860462) by Chris McNab on 26th March, which includes a big section on
pandemics. It begins with the possible catastrophe scenarios such as virus
outbreaks and disease, as well as environmental disasters, wars and terrorism.
Chapter by chapter, the book looks at the areas you need to prepare:
pre-preparing food for a crisis, finding clean water, maintaining your health,
defending yourself, and creating power supplies. With tips and techniques from
survival experts, this book shows you what to do in the weeks, months and years
that follow disaster. With more than 300 easy-to-follow artworks and handy
pull-out lists of key information, this book teaches you all the skills and
offers you all the tips and information, you may need if things really go
wrong.
If you’re missing the squash and squeeze
of the daily commute in London, then you could just have a little flick through
of Seats of London (£12.99, pb, 978 1916045316) to remind yourself of all those journeys
you won’t be making for the foreseeable! This title has had five start reviews
and is a brilliantly colourful guide to all the patterns and designs used by
London Transport from the first horse bus to the latest Tube train. It’s published
by Safe Haven.
Running around like a headless chicken,
and panicking? Attention! The Power of Simple Decisions
in a Distracted World (£12.99, pb, 978
1788601450) which is coming from Practical Inspiration in May, could be
just what you need. Research shows that having more to choose from causes
anxiety and decreases our likelihood of taking action. We have become paralyzed,
ceding control of our decisions to a continuous onslaught of information,
marketing, and interruption. We live in an age where we struggle to decide which
information is real or fake and find it challenging to make even the most
straightforward decisions. Rob Hatch sets out a powerful framework and flexible approach
that gives you the space to focus your attention on what is important, and the
ability to take action with confidence. It’s had some fab endorsements from
business leaders such as Aime Miyamoto, who says ‘with Attention! Rob Hatch offers an inspiring and practical guide that can
support us all.’
The Best Ever Three and Four
Ingredient Cookbook (978
1780194387, £11.99, pb) by Jenny White and Joanna
Farrow shows you how you can make
over 400 fuss-free and fast recipes using only four ingredients or less and has
over 1,550 step-by-step photographs. You can see a preview here. This terrific cookbook from Lorenz
shown you how to make more with less, and could be just the thing for those who
have found the supermarket shelves bare!
A poetry podcast is probably just what
we all need to help us stay calm, and this is lovely: poet Caroline Bird in conversation
with Suzannah V. Evans, recorded at the StAnza Poetry Festival. The Air Year is a
time of flight, transition and suspension: signatures scribbled on the sky.
Bird's speakers exist in a state of unrest, trapped in a liminal place between
take-off and landing, undeniably lost. Love is uncontrollable, joy comes and
goes at hurricane speed. They walk to the cliff edge, close their eyes and step
out into the air. Caroline Bird has five previous collections published by Carcanet.
Her fifth, In These Days of Prohibition,
was shortlisted for the 2017 TS Eliot Prize and the Ted Hughes
Award.
Comma
are one of the six presses taking part in the Translated Fiction Online Book
Club. Hosted by Peirene Press, and in collaboration with Charco Press,
Istros Books, Nordisk Books and Tilted Axis Press as well as Comma, this
aims to be a welcome way to keep readers' spirits up if they're isolated, and a
great way to find new fiction! Sessions are free and open to all via Zoom,
every Thursday at 8pm. You can find out all about it here and see the schedule of books that
will be discussed. Comma’s Thirteen Months of
Sunrise (£19.99, pb, 978 1910974391)
by Rania Mamoun is
on April 23rd, with the session led by the translator (from its original
Arabic) Elisabeth Jaquette.
A big shout out and a huge well done to
the nine Regional Independent Bookshop of the
Year Award Winners! The shops on the shortlist for Independent Bookshop of the Year are: Book-ish in Crickhowell , BrOOK’S
in Pinner, Button & Bear in Shrewsbury, Forum Books in
Corbridge, Hunting Raven Books in Frome, Lighthouse Books in
Edinburgh, Philip’s in Mallow, County Cork, The Book Hive in
Norwich and The Book Shop in Lee-on-the-Solent. You can read more on
that story here.
In Pluto publicity news, there’s
an extract of Lola Olufemi’s Feminism, Interrupted in Refinary29 here,
an
article by Ben Tippet, author of Split: Class Divides Uncovered entitled ‘The Cornonavirus is Exposing Britain’s
Class Divisions’ in LabourList here, an article by JJ Bola for Mask
Off: Masculinity Redefined in the Huffington Post here
and a mention for Surviving Climate Change: The
Struggle to Avert Global Catastrophe in
Counterpunch here.
Hurrah for Emerald and Kogan
Page who are shortlisted along with Bloomsbury Academic, Cambridge
University Press, Collins and our old pals Jessica Kingsley for the Academic, Educational and Professional Publisher of the
Year in the Nibbies. Good luck all – the hotly contested
awards will be announced at this year’s ceremony which has been rescheduled to
29th June.
Find Your Calm (978 1789506488, £6.99, pb) and Find Your Happy (978
1789506495 £6.99, pb) are two titles from Arcturus published this month
that will be ideal for helping anxious children cope with this crisis. By Dr Katie O'Connell, a child and family
psychotherapist with years of experience, they are brilliant activity books for
kids to colour, doodle, and puzzle their way to expressing negative feelings
and learning how to deal with their worries. The fun activities build
resilience, increase inner calm, improve understanding of emotions and
encourage positivity. They are suitable for children aged 6+.
Uplifting Song number 5. All this self-isolation means less pollution
so we can see more of Mr Blue Sky
With most of the nation’s children now
to be taught at home for the foreseeable future, there should be good demand
for the Legend/University of Buckingham Press study at home titles, such
as the TeachitRight series, the Numerical Crosswords and
the Code-It workbooks
pictured here. You can find all the details on their website at https://ubpl.buckingham.ac.uk/catalogue
And with increased anxiety levels all
round, this title which cuts through the media frenzy and over-sentimentality
surrounding mental health could be just what’s required. Sweet Distress: How Our Love Affair With Feelings Has Fuelled
The Current Mental Health Crisis (and what we can do about it) by Gillian Bridge (£12.99, pb, 978 1785834677) is a book of ‘loving
logic’ which puts emotional well-being and resilience centre stage. It’s just
been published by Crown, and Gillian has already done a great interview with
Spiked magazine that you can read here. Gillian will also be interviewed on Love
Sport Radio and the Sunday Times and has participated in a panel
discussion on the BBC Radio Manchester Breakfast Show.
Opinion may be divided as to how our
leader is coping with the practical issues thrown up by the coronavirus, but
one thing’s for sure, he’s certainly enjoying the opportunity to give us plenty
of speeches. Boris is the most verbose Prime Minister of recent years, as one
reviewer said ‘perhaps the most beguiling wordsmith of the age, soaring to
the peak of high office on wings of glittering prose.’ The Borisaurus by Simon Walters is a
lexicon of the Prime Minister’s funniest, wittiest, most interesting words and
phrases compiled into one brilliant dictionary, with every entry accompanied by
a guide to its etymology, pronunciation, meaning and the intention of its use. The Borisaurus (£12.99,
hb, 978 1785905698) will be serialised in the Daily Mail on 4th and 11th
April and is published by Biteback on 9 April. As Anthony Seldon said ‘Boris
sees language as Play-Doh, as raw material to be manipulated into an infinite
number of novel shapes and combinations. This ingenious book takes us on a
journey into the mind of our Play-Doh player-in-chief.’
And finally, here's a public service announcement from
Simon Pegg and Nick Frost. Don’t panic, we can beat the apocalypse together. I’m
happy to say that this two-minute film has already gone viral – in the best
possible way.
That’s all folks, more next
week! This weekly blog is written for the UK
book trade. If you would like to order any of the titles mentioned, then please
talk to your Compass Sales Manager, or call the Compass office on 020 8326
5696. Every Friday an e-newsletter containing highlights from the blog is sent
out to over 700 booksellers and if you’d like to receive this then please
contact nuala@compassips.london
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