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If you have to ask to what, then you may not qualify as the ultimate Hunger Games fan. The release date for the movie is March 23, 2012. It feels a little cruel that we have to wait an extra day (leap year). On the one hand, March 23rd is long enough, but on the other, I would have liked to see a summer blockbuster with a female star. I think this movie could’ve gone up against the likes of “Green Lantern,” “Thor,” “Captain America,” or any other man in tights and come out as the top money-maker. While I don’t see any need for having a 3D version of the Hunger Games, but my experience this summer is that movie studios will throw it in to get the extra ticket money whether or not the movie warrants it. I’m resigning myself to seeing one of Katniss’ arrows fly in three dimensions.
Last week, Lionsgate announced the release date for Catching Fire, November 22, 2013 most assuredly monopolizing the Thanksgiving weekend movie sales. For those of you that are counting, that’s 828 days away.
Laura Sanderson Healy, freelance writer and former Londoner, contributes another fabulous post about a book shop in London. Check out her previous bookstore adventures in London, Memphis, and Los Angeles. Thank you Laura!
John Sandoe [Books] Ltd. , the charming London bookshop at 10 Blacklands Terrace near Sloane Square in Chelsea, would delight any booklover on earth should they happen to blow in. A shopkeeper’s bell heralds arrivals at this tiny temple to literature; housed in low, 18th-century Regency buildings, its three stories are packed to the gunwales with texts of all kinds jammed ceiling to floor and up and down the creaky staircases. The staff is always deep in conversation with patrons on the ground floor level while children paw through their favorites downstairs on the lower ground floor. It is the go-to bookseller for the talented likes of Manolo Blahnik and Elton John as well as the noisy herd of England’s finest scribblers, including Tom Stoppard.
It’s a tonic to visit John Sandoe, and to say its workers will bend over backwards (despite the cramped legroom) to help you find something is an understatement. Like the art shop Greene and Stone further down the King’s Road, they are one of the stockists for the English magazine Illustration and once when I asked how I might get earlier editions of the journal, a staffer at the bookstore picked up the phone and rang the editor Ruth Prickett directly. Within minutes, Prickett materialized before me (“as if by magic,” like in the Mr. Benn stories) with the copies I desired and we soon were looking at books together (graphic novel editions of the parts of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time) and discussing the Peter Blake’s pop art heritage. According to the Illustration website, “This new magazine was first conceived through a chance conversation in a bookshop in February 2004.” These things happen at John Sandoe.
When I went to collect a Folger Library exhibition catalogue of George Romney’s Shakespearean drawings my father had ordered at John Sandoe on his last visit to London in 1999, I enjoyed the quizzical response from the staff member ringing up my other purchases that day: “Elizabeth Kubler-Ross (On Death and Dying), Ant and Bee (a children’s series), (Theatre de Complicite’s) The Three Lives of Lucie Cabrol – well, that’s an eclectic mix.” I recently left the shop with palm-sized Quince Tree Press pocket books – Lawrence Sterne, The Rossettis, Thomas Bewick, William Cobbett – as well as the newly-published Behind Closed Doors: The Tragic, Untold Story of The Duchess of Windsor by Hugo Vickers, which had been recommended to me by a friend who still lives in London and follows these social striations.
On John Sandoe Books’ website is its quarterly catalogues as well as its own reviews of books, favorite subjects including letters, gardens, outdoor life, travel, diaries, psychology, and crime. Under “We recommend” is the statement: “Every day people ask us what they should be reading. Whilst our opinions about individual books might differ, we all share an enthusiasm for reading and what little spare time we have is taken up with this most rewarding of activities …The books are varied in style and subject, but each is excellent in its way. We don’t expect them all to appeal, but the list reflects the wide range of interest that we have in the shop. And that’s why there are no business or sport books.” Every Christmas John Sandoe Books publishes a story after a competition amongst its regulars.
Tags: London bookstore, UK bookstore
A couple of years ago, Claire thought up a few questions to ask authors about their bookstore experiences. In honor of the publication last week of her first YA novel, Epic Fail, I decided to turn the tables a bit and ask them of her.
1. Did you have a special bookstore in your life that helped foster your love of reading?
Absolutely. The New England Mobile Book Fair, which we always just called Strymish’s because the Strymishes owned it, was where I discovered and bought most of the authors who made me want to become a writer, like Virginia Woolf and D.H. Lawrence (I was a much more sophisticated reader as a teenager than I am now). It was a very unusual place to browse because the books were organized by publisher, not genre. If there was something specific you were looking for, you had to look it up in a book at the front of the store and then find the aisle with that publisher and look for your author there. Publishing houses were smaller back then and had more personality, so if you liked an author, there was a good chance you might like another published by the same house.
In a really amazing coincidence, I discovered a few months ago that a good friend of mine is related to the Strymishes, who owned the store for decades (they were trying to sell it last year–not sure what happened). The world is a very small place.
2. Do you have a hometown bookstore now that you are likeliest to visit?
I did, but sadly it closed just this summer. The owner said it had just gotten too tough–so many people had gotten e-readers recently that she just wasn’t selling enough books. And people would literally walk into the store, browse, and say to their friends, “Oh, I want to get this–I’m going to go home and order it from Amazon/on my e-reader.” That kind of thinking is destroying our wonderful little Indies.
There is a lovely little bookstore not far from me–Diesel Books, in Brentwood, and we do go there fairly often.
3. Do you have a favorite place for signings/readings?
Vroman’s Bookstore in Pasadena made me feel so welcome when I read there that I’m doing another reading there this fall, when Families and Other Nonreturnable Gifts comes out (on October 4 at 7 pm, for you LA people–please come). It’s a great bookstore–the kind of place where you can waste hours happily browsing. Unfortunately it’s not all that close, especially with traffic.
4. Do you know any unusual bookstores that are doing something different from all others?
Well, Vroman’s, which I mentioned above, has wisely broadened to selling a lot more than just books. It really is a one-stop gift destination. If you were doing your holiday shopping, you could just go there and, yes, get lots of books but you could also find toys, clothing, and the like. They happen to have the space to do that–many stores don’t–and I think it’s really smart.
5. If a bookstore were to group your book with three others, which would you hand-pick?
Since Epic Fail is Young Adult fiction, I would choose my three favorite YA novels–which would be all three books in the Suzanne Collins Hunger Games trilogy. Just my book and those three (bestselling, mindblowingly good) books. Yeah. That’s a display I’d like to see.
Thanks Claire!
The first time I heard of The Help was from the owner of Between the Covers in Bend, OR. Her description was so enticing I couldn’t wait to read it. Then the bookseller realized that she had told so many people about the book, she sold them all. That is the quintessential history of this book, one person telling another how much she likes it. I wish I had a dollar for every time a bookseller or reader recommended this book to me. (I always respond, “I enjoyed The Help, if you liked it, then read The Well and the Mine also.) In record speed, The Help is a movie. In fact, it felt like the movie raced the paperback. Kathryn Stockett and Tate Taylor discuss the very un-Hollywood development of the movie on KCRW’s ‘The Business.’ It’s an interview that will leave you with a smile.
The movie is released on National Book Lovers Day. Nice to know we have our own day! Grab your book loving friends and go together, mine is meeting at the theater tomorrow night for a mid-summer night out.
Tags: book to movie, The Help movie
Claire
Kim
