Emily Rhodes

I happened to be with some family friends the other day. The daughter, just out of school, is soon to go travelling to various far-flung destinations and to this end she was busy assembling her backpack — a stage I remember all too well from my own first big trip. Trying to fit everything you

I am beginning to lose my patience with the weather. I suspect I am not alone in feeling utterly dispirited by this endless onslaught of rain. We have just come out of the wettest April on record, and still the rain falls … It’s too terrible for words. Except that nothing is too terrible for

Classics were predicted to be one of the first things to fall at the feet of eBooks. Traditional booksellers — like me — have been in a perpetual cold sweat, wondering how to make up the lost revenue for around a third of our sales. Classics publishers must have been positively feverish with worry. The

Chances are you’ve read, seen, or at least heard about The Hunger Games, the young-adult book and film sensation by Suzanne Collins. The crux of the story centres on The Hunger Games itself, an annual event in a dystopia in which twenty-four teenagers are forced to fight each other to the death – the winner

Lately, I have been giving rather a lot of thought to the humble paperback. I say humble, for this is a format with no pretensions of grandeur, no fancy binding, no place-keeping ribbon, no dust-protecting jacket that can be slipped on and off as you will. I have always been told that modesty is a

It’s Mother’s Day on Sunday and what could be a more thoughtful present for one’s mum than a good book? Especially a book that features a happy relationship between a mother and her child. Surely it beats an overpriced, overcrowded Sunday brunch out somewhere, or a bunch of panic-bought, petrol-station flowers? With this in mind,

March is a strangely active time in the book world. Like plants that have been slumbering through the cold winter, books are beginning to wake up and stir themselves into action for the joys of spring. Please indulge me with the slightly dippy analogy, as I think it’s surprisingly pertinent. After all, spring tends to

Chances are you’ve already seen this incredible round-up of the ten most beautiful bookshops in the world. This recent post on hip US blog Flavorwire has enjoyed remarkable success, inspiring several articles and a huge amount of praise and discussion in various forums worldwide. Over here in Britain, the Guardian’s article about it received nearly

In the musty old bookworld, prizes are terribly exciting. Yes, book awards will never reach the world-televised-designer-frock-paraded-on-red-carpet level of the Oscars, but any keen bookish person was waiting with baited breath for the announcement of the Costa Book of the Year last Tuesday night. The Costa Prize was the acme of literary excitement of the

When I read an article in the Telegraph recently, which pointed out that Oxfam is the third biggest retailer of books in the UK, I got a shock similar to when I learnt, last year, that The Bookseller had named Sainsbury’s chain bookseller of the year. It feels peculiar to think of brands like Oxfam

Amazon reported that Christmas Day was the ‘biggest ever day for Kindle downloads’. Evidently, this year, many people are going to begin to read eBooks. Shaking off the doom-and-gloom that a seller of printed books inevitably feels at such a prospect, I can’t help but notice the nice timing. All these people are trying out

Last week saw poets Alice Oswald and John Kinsella withdraw from the shortlist of the TS Eliot Prize. Their refusal to be in the running for this prestigious award was on the grounds that the Poetry Book Society, which runs it, is sponsored by hedge fund manager Aurum Funds. Oswald said that she thought ‘poetry

Call me superficial, but I would far sooner buy a beautiful book than an ugly one. It’s something to think about when Christmas shopping — a concern that’s only magnified when it comes to buying a book as a present, rather than for oneself. It’s also something to bear in mind in the broader context

This is the second instalment of Emily Rhodes’ Inside Books series. A rose by any other name might smell as sweet, but anyone with even a poor sense of smell and negligible knowledge of botany will have noticed that some roses smell sweeter than others. The same goes for the names of books. As some

Emily Rhodes used to work for a major publishing house and now manages an independent bookshop in London. She is currently writing a novel. She blogs at EmilyBooks, and has just started tweeting @EmilyBooksBlog. This is the first column in her ‘Inside Books’ series, which will endeavour to shed light on the inner murk of the