Status Updates From A Bookshop of One’s Own

Alice Walker was beautiful and serene…

…And in that queue was a young Black British writer, Malorie Blackman, who was struggling to get published. It took Blackman about three hours to get to the front of the queue, to the signing table, to meet her hero. In her outstanding auto biography Just Savin' she tells us how their conversation went:

'Please could you write "don't give up" in it for me requested.

All my life, books have been as essential to me as breathing… …Don't you sometimes just stop and marvel at a sentence? How did the writer pick those words, polish them and then put them in the right order? How did they create a sentence so breathtaking, you just want to pick it up and hug it? So, dear writers, for what you say and how vou say it. I am immensely grateful

Not quite as profitable but certainly rather intriguing was a customer in 1998 whose visit was writ ten up in the Bookseller. A gentleman from Saudi Arabia bought five feminist T-shirts. "That', Jane was quoted as saying, is rev lution as far as I'm concerned.' The reporter put question: 'Do you think they were for his wives?' put the obvious.

She very sweetly asked for some recommendations bought all the books we suggested, and her bodyguard paid Like the Queen, Spice Girls don't carry money. Rather at the other end of the spectrum, Judge Stephen Tumin, Chief Inspector of Prisons, was a regular, and we felt useful when people from the United Nations High Commission for Refugees bought lots of books on rape in war during the Bosnian conflict.