Download or read book The Diary of a Bookseller written by Shaun Bythell and published by Melville House. This book was released on 2018-09-04 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A WRY AND HILARIOUS ACCOUNT OF LIFE AT A BOOKSHOP IN A REMOTE SCOTTISH VILLAGE "Among the most irascible and amusing bookseller memoirs I've read." --Dwight Garner, New York Times "Warm, witty and laugh-out-loud funny..."—Daily Mail The Diary of a Bookseller is Shaun Bythell's funny and fascinating memoir of a year in the life at the helm of The Bookshop, in the small village of Wigtown, Scotland—and of the delightfully odd locals, unusual staff, eccentric customers, and surreal buying trips that make up his life there as he struggles to build his business . . . and be polite . . . When Bythell first thought of taking over the store, it seemed like a great idea: The Bookshop is Scotland's largest second-hand store, with over one hundred thousand books in a glorious old house with twisting corridors and roaring fireplaces, set in a tiny, beautiful town by the sea. It seemed like a book-lover's paradise . . . Until Bythell did indeed buy the store. In this wry and hilarious diary, he tells us what happened next—the trials and tribulations of being a small businessman; of learning that customers can be, um, eccentric; and of wrangling with his own staff of oddballs (such as ski-suit-wearing, dumpster-diving Nicky). And perhaps none are quirkier than the charmingly cantankerous bookseller Bythell himself turns out to be. But then too there are the buying trips to old estates and auctions, with the thrill of discovery, as well as the satisfaction of pressing upon people the books that you love . . . Slowly, with a mordant wit and keen eye, Bythell is seduced by the growing charm of small-town life, despite —or maybe because of—all the peculiar characters there.
Download or read book Wigtown Ploughman written by John McNeillie and published by Birlinn Publishers. This book was released on 2012 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In following the growth into manhood of young Andy Walker, this novel provides a realistic depiction of the lives and living conditions of the rural laboring poor in Scotland in the 1930s. The son of an abusive father, Andy leaves school at age 13 and works for a succession of corrupt and cruel landowners. Driven from one estate for refusing to marry the mother of his illegitimate child, Andy drifts into a life of petty crime, all the time sinking further into a continuing cycle of violence and poverty. A chance encounter leads to the prospect of a professional boxing career, but realizing himself to be a true son of the soil, Andy returns to farm work, accepting his destiny with elegiac resignation. An uncompromisingly gritty tale filled with relentless violence and unrelieved squalor, its impact upon publication in 1938 was widespread and extraordinary as public reaction was sharply divided between those who loathed it and those who thought it true.
Download or read book Historic Wigtown written by Richard D. Oram and published by Council for British Archaeology. This book was released on 2014 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Situated in what now seems a remote corner of south-west Scotland, Wigtown was once an important county town. With its harbour and location at the lowest fording point of the River Cree, Wigtown was at one time part of a major network of land and sea routes, including a pilgrim route to Whithorn. The layout of the town is notable for its large market square, a reflection of its importance in the cattle trade in the medieval period. The town achieved burgh status in the thirteenth century, by which time it was an important trading centre, and the present arrangement of streets and burgage plots dates to this time. Today the principal access route is from the north, rather than through the East and West Ports which controlled access to the great market place. The burgh arms depict a three-masted sailing ship, demonstrating the importance placed on its maritime trade. This book examines both the town's political history, as it passed between the earldoms of Wigtown and Douglas, and its economic history, as it competed with Whithorn, before its eventual decline in the later nineteenth century. The authors use the surviving buildings to examine the development of the town from the medieval to the modern period. This book is part of the Scottish Burgh Survey - a series funded by Historic Scotland designed to identify the archaeological potential of Scotland's historic towns.
Download or read book The Fiction of Robin Jenkins written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2017-04-03 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Fiction of Robin Jenkins is the first ever volume of essays dedicated to Robin Jenkins (1912-2005), hailed by Andrew Marr as ‘the best-kept secret in Modern British Literature’, and by the Scotsman in 2000 as ‘the greatest living fiction-writer in Scotland [...] the Scottish Thomas Hardy’. This new study of Jenkins includes essays across his entire, astonishingly varied body of work. It includes provocative new readings of a range of thematic issues by established experts on Jenkins and on Scottish Literature more broadly. This volume also includes chapters dedicated to individual novels in Jenkins’s corpus, including his best-known work, The Cone-Gatherers, as well as The Changeling, Fergus Lamont, and his posthumous novel, The Pearl Fishers. Contributors: Ingibjörg Ágústsdóttir, Timothy C. Baker, Linden Bicket, Gerard Carruthers, Cairns Craig, Douglas Gifford, Michael Lamont, Margery Palmer McCulloch, Isobel Murray, Glenda Norquay, Alan Riach, David Robb, Bernard Sellin, Gavin Wallace.
Download or read book A Sailor Boy s Experience Aboard a Slave Ship written by Samuel Robinson and published by GC Book Publishers Limited. This book was released on 1867 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Remainders of the Day written by Shaun Bythell and published by Profile Books. This book was released on 2022-09-01 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Effortlessly charming ... it is soothing to sink once again into the rhythms of Bythell's year' TLS The Bookshop in Wigtown is a bookworm's idyll - with thousands of books across nearly a mile of shelves, a real log fire, and Captain, the bookshop cat. You'd think after twenty years, owner Shaun Bythell would be used to the customers by now. Don't get him wrong - there are some good ones among the antiquarian erotica-hunters, die-hard Arthurians, people who confuse bookshops for libraries and the toddlers just looking for a nice cosy corner in which to wee. He's sure there are. There must be some good ones, right? Filled with the pernickety warmth and humour that has touched readers around the world, stuffed with literary treasures, hidden gems and incunabula, Remainders of the Day is Shaun Bythell's latest entry in his bestselling diary series.
Download or read book Tretower to Clyro written by Karl Miller and published by Quercus. This book was released on 2011-07-07 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Karl Miller is one of the greatest literary critics of the last fifty years, the founder of the London Review of Books and Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English Literature at University College, London. In this last book of essays he turns his attention to appreciate certain writers of the English-speaking modern world. Most of them are inhabitants of the North Sea archipelago once known as Great Britain, who are here seen as tribally distinct, as Scottish, English, Irish or Welsh, and as a single society. A new ruralism has come to notice in this country, and the book is drawn to country lives as they have figured in the literature of the last century. An introductory essay is centred on the Anglo-Welsh borderlands. Journeys taken with Seamus Heaney and Andrew O'Hagan to this countryside, and others, are threaded throughout the book. The poets Heaney and Ted Hughes are discussed, together with the fiction of Ian McEwan, the Canadian writer Alistair Macleod, the Irish writer John McGahern and the Baltimorean Anne Tyler. Scotland is a preoccupation of the later pieces, including the letters of Henry Cockburn, a lifelong interest of the author, who is also interested here in foxes and their current metropolitan profile.
Download or read book A Child of Two Nations written by Ian Stockton and published by Ian Stockton. This book was released on 2022-12-09 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This evocative memoir recaptures with almost photographic recall the now distant world of a 1950's childhood. Set largely in industrial North Staffordshire, it tells of a boy's first eleven years of life. Born to an Ayrshire mother and an English Gordon Highlander, he knows that he belongs to both nations.
Download or read book Scotland s Books written by Robert Crawford and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2009-01-30 with total page 848 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Treasure Island to Trainspotting, Scotland's rich literary tradition has influenced writing across centuries and cultures far beyond its borders. Here, for the first time, is a single volume presenting the glories of fifteen centuries of Scottish literature. In Scotland's Books the much loved poet Robert Crawford tells the story of Scottish imaginative writing and its relationship to the country's history. Stretching from the medieval masterpieces of St. Columba's Iona - the earliest surviving Scottish work - to the energetic world of twenty-first-century writing by authors such as Ali Smith and James Kelman, this outstanding account traces the development of literature in Scotland and explores the cultural, linguistic and literary heritage of the nation. It includes extracts from the writing discussed to give a flavor of the original work, and its new research ranges from specially made translations of ancient poems to previously unpublished material from the Scottish Enlightenment and interviews with living writers. Informative and readable, this is the definitive single-volume guide to the marvelous legacy of Scottish literature.
Download or read book My Childhood written by Ian Niall and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Scottish Journal of Agriculture written by and published by . This book was released on 1920 with total page 546 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Three Things You Need to Know About Rockets written by Jessica A. Fox and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2013-08-27 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this inspiring, delightful memoir, a young woman decides to escape the daily grind and turn her “what if” fantasy into a reality, only to find work—and a man—she loves in one fell swoop, all in a secondhand bookstore in a quaint Scottish town. Jessica Fox was living in Hollywood, an ambitious 26-year-old film-maker with a high-stress job at NASA. Working late one night, craving another life, she was seized by a moment of inspiration and tapped “second hand bookshop Scotland” into Google. She clicked the first link she saw. A month later, she arrived 2,000 miles across the Atlantic in Wigtown, on the west coast of Scotland, and knocked on the door of the bookshop she would be living in for the next month . . . The rollercoaster journey that ensued—taking in Scottish Hanukkah, yoga on Galloway’s west coast, and a waxing that she will never forget—would both break and mend her heart. It would also teach her that sometimes we must have the courage to travel the path less taken. Only then can we truly become the writers of our own stories.
Download or read book Cencrastus written by and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Agricultural Labourer written by Great Britain. Royal Commission on Labour and published by . This book was released on 1893 with total page 640 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Scottish Journal of Agriculture written by and published by . This book was released on 1919 with total page 692 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book An Introduction To Scottish Ethnology written by Alexander Fenton and published by Birlinn. This book was released on 2013-08-06 with total page 641 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The publication of An Introduction to Scottish Ethnology sees the completion of the fourteen-volume Scottish Life and Society series, originally conceived by the eminent ethnologist Professor Alexander Fenton. The series explores the many elements in Scottish history, language and culture which have shaped the identity of Scotland and Scots at local, regional and national level, placing these in an international context. Each of the thirteen volumes already published focuses on a particular theme or institution within Scottish society. This introduction provides an overview of the discipline of ethnology as it has developed in Scotland and more widely, the sources and methods for its study, and practical guidance on the means by which it can be examined within its constituent genres, based on the experience of those currently working with ethnological materials. Theory and practice are presented in an accessible fashion, making it an ideal companion for the student, the scholar and the interested amateur alike.
Download or read book Where the Whaups are Crying written by Innes F. Macleod and published by Birlinn Publishers. This book was released on 2001 with total page 476 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This anthology of Scottish writers and writing includes work by John Buchan, Walter Scott, Thomas Carlyle, James Boswell, Daniel Defoe, John Welsley, J.M. Barrie, and John Keats. Also included are a range of anecdotes and non fiction concerning the area.
