A really interesting in depth look at the whole world of books and associated subjects.

I’m not much of a non fiction reader but this held my interest !

Due to a sudden, unexpected passing in the family a few years ago and another more recently and my subsequent (mental) health issues stemming from that, I was unable to download this book in time to review it before it was archived as I did not visit this site for several years after the bereavements. This meant I didn't read or venture onto netgalley for years as not only did it remind me of that person as they shared my passion for reading, but I also struggled to maintain interest in anything due to overwhelming depression. I was therefore unable to download this title in time and so I couldn't give a review as it wasn't successfully acquired before it was archived. The second issue that has happened with some of my other books is that I had them downloaded to one particular device and said device is now defunct, so I have no access to those books anymore, sadly.

This means I can't leave an accurate reflection of my feelings towards the book as I am unable to read it now and so I am leaving a message of explanation instead. I am now back to reading and reviewing full time as once considerable time had passed I have found that books have been helping me significantly in terms of my mindset and mental health - this was after having no interest in anything for quite a number of years after the passings. Anything requested and approved will be read and a review written and posted to Amazon (where I am a Hall of Famer & Top Reviewer), Goodreads (where I have several thousand friends and the same amount who follow my reviews) and Waterstones (or Barnes & Noble if the publisher is American based). Thank you for the opportunity and apologies for the inconvenience.

My thanks to NetGalley andPenguin Press for a copy of “ The Bookseller’s Tale “ for an honest review
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I’ve recently read “Once Upon A Tome “ and Shaun Bythell’s collection of bookseller books , all of which I’ve really enjoyed . Perhaps that is why , for me , this book seemed a little dull in comparison. It is, as it states a cultural history of books , which is very informative but I must admit I’d hoped for more anecdotal content.
I will try and read this again at a later date to see if I change my opinion, as it has such good reviews from others.

Such a different book to the ones I’ve been reading recently, I loved it.

Thank you NetGalley for my complimentary copy in return for my honest review.

I started bookselling *counts on fingers* (*runs out of fingers, adds toes - still not enough...*) 33 years ago. No wonder I'm tired. But Martin Latham, a legendary figure to old Waterstones hands, has been around even longer (and, unlike me had other jobs before he turned his hand to shelving, table-pyramidding and recommending for a living). This book is partly his reminiscences about his long career in retail and partly (a larger part) a history of bookselling itself and of our relationship with books and reading. We explore books through the ages - from the earliest days of handwritten and illustrated volumes, through the rise of 'chapbooks' (short, popular books which were often illustrated and started nearly 400 years before Penguin paperbacks) - as well as the ways that they were sold (book pedlars, stalls of the kind that still flourish along the Seine in Paris and, of course, bookshops themselves). There are some stories of interactions with authors and bookshop customers but many, many more about the real stars of the show - the books themselves.

A cornucopia of rich pickings for anyone who loves books, for anyone who buys and sells books and for anyone really who has ever read a book!

I love books obsessively. As a matter of fact, I enjoy reading books about books, as in stories about writers, fiction and non-fiction books, the history of reading practices, literary tourism, and all sorts of things. You say 'books', 'reading' or 'readers' and you already have my full attention. Martin Latham's The Bookseller's Tale is a lovely mixture of memoir and history and all sorts of things about books, following every part of a book's journey to a bookshop. Part memoir part history, it is a collection of interesting anecdotes and information about books from someone who seems to really know what he is talking about. In this sense, it is a bit unique in its approach and a bit more personal, something that might seem peculiar to some readers and a pure delight to others - I fall in the latter category. I loved the author's passion for books.

I think the title is enough to describe this book. A book lover's treat. Different anecdotes about books, booksellers, bookshops, passages, etc. A mixed bag of bookish treasure.
Thanks a lot to NG and the publisher for this copy.

Interesting perspective on books, booksellers and readers throughout history. Fascinating read, even if some of it did feel slightly above my head. Some genuinely touching moments, particularly the autobiographical parts. A good read for book lovers.

I loved dipping in and out of this collection of tales especially as I am familiar with Canterbury Waterstones. A treat for booklovers and bookstore fans!

A fascinating, amusing, chatty and thoughtful book of anecdotes and stories from a bookseller in Canterbury. He discusses various aspects of books as well as the history of bookselling and libraries.
I was hooked when he wrote about comfort books that we recall reading when young. Having discounted The House of Pooh Corner as too juvenile, I plumped for The Silver Sword, a book I remember discovering in the primary school library. A few pages later he mentions the very same book!
I thoroughly enjoyed reading this and from it have noted down several titles that I want to look out for. I would recommend The Bookseller's Tale to anyone who loves books.

A really marvellous book, I enjoyed taking a walk down memory lane with this book about books and reading. It encouraged me to think about my comfort books. Well done, Mr. Latham!

This book wasn't what I expected but I thoroughly enjoyed and it gave a lot of food for thought.
It mixes reflections on the relationships between reader and books with anecdotes.
It's interesting and engrossing even if it's a bit confused at times.
I recommend it.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine

An Ode To Books....
Beautifully written ode to books, a journey through a book lovers love affair with books. Not purely a cultural history of people and books but also a memoir and heartfelt ode of a bookseller. Compelling and engaging and laced with dry humour. Delightful.

I enjoyed The Bookseller’s Tale by Martin Latham but it wasn’t the book I expected! My wife drew my attention to it but I confess I was on auto-pilot and got the book without research. I assumed it would be a light-hearted series of anecdotes, akin to James Herriott’s tales of a vet’s life. Instead, it is a very thoughtful book, mostly musings upon the relationship between humans, reading and books with far fewer anecdotes than I expected. Latham doesn’t actually tell us his tale until we’ve read 90% of the book. He’s been selling books since the 1980s. For the last thirty years, he has run Waterstones in Canterbury.

Initially, I didn’t enjoy the book. Phrases such as “we are both infinite and serendipitous” had me scribbling “Eh?” but the next paragraph describes customers hugging or kissing books after buying them and giving little moans of pleasure. Yep, guilty of all three there!

There are chapters on comfort books (mine are a well-loved battered handful of second-hand Georgette Heyer romances) and the battle to read, experienced by poor workers and by women in less enlightened times with the poet Edmund Spenser “terrified by the effects of unrestricted printing on womanhood”. There’s a chapter on the power of cheap books such as chapbooks – the forerunners of penny dreadfuls – followed by a chapter on the pedlars who sold them, including a great section on Scottish pedlars and how they would trade gossip as well as selling books, ribbons, pins, etc..

The chapter on libraries has another sentence where I scribbled “Eh?”: “It seems that browsing mindlessly is somehow browsing mindfully.” However, this history of libraries has a wonderful quote from Andrew Pettegree about the library “…that new phenomenon of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the library as mausoleum, the silent repository of countless unread books.” Ouch! And I didn’t know that Ruskin used a saw to make all his books the same height.

The chapter on book collectors and bibliophiles mentions Charles Isham, who introduced the garden gnome to England. His daughter celebrated his death by using a rifle to destroy his gnomes. Latham states “The Ishams were never predictable”.

One HUGE advantage of ebooks was brought home to me by the chapters on marginalia and Signs of Use. I just cannot bring myself to write in physical books. It just feels disrespectful, despite Latham’s persuasive explanation that everyone did it until the invention of printing led to smaller margins. However, I gleefully highlight sentences and make notes using my kindle app because they’re a layer over the original text and I can easily remove them to leave the pristine etext.

I loved Latham’s anecdote about being so annoyed with a fairy tale he was reading to a toddler that he and said toddler agreed to throw the book out of the bedroom window. Now THAT is role-model behaviour that encourages children to question and challenge what they are told. Every so often, Latham makes splendid puns, such as his comment upon people wanting new books rather than ones that show their previous ownership – “a sort of War on Terroir”.

Although each of the preceding chapters takes a global rather than a UK-only view, there are some chapters on book-selling in France and New York. We then have Latham’s personal history and, finally, a bibliography. His personal tales of how he came to understand that a bookshop ought to be staffed by a diverse team who know various genres are lovely. The bibliography deserves reading as another chapter. Latham doesn’t just list the books to which he referred; he describes them too. Fairs, Markets and the Itinerant Book Trade, edited by Robin Myers, is “romantic and riveting”.

Having now read the whole book and understood Latham’s philosophy that drives it, two aspects disappoint me: I would have liked an index (a petty criticism I know, but it would be useful); and I think the first couple of chapters struck me as over-written. Another reviewer has used the description “pretentious”. I think that’s an over-statement but it’s not far off the mark. I wasn’t grabbed early on and many others might glance at the introduction and first chapter in a bookshop and then put the book down again. That would be a shame.

#TheBooksellersTale #NetGalley

Martin Latham runs Waterstones in Canterbury and has been a bookseller for thirty-five years, making him the longest-serving Waterstones manager. The Bookseller’s Tale is an idiosyncratic memoir which draws upon Latham’s experiences amongst books, authors, book buyers and book lovers.

The blurb describes this book as “part cultural history, part literary love letter and part reluctant memoir”. It is, in fact, a work which is hard to pin down. It contains a lot of historical details on such bookish subjects as itinerant sellers and book pedlars, libraries through the ages, marginalia, female authors and readers and even booklice species. Yet, it does not feel like an academic book, and more like the author’s own whimsical romp through book history. While not exactly an autobiography (we learn much more about Latham the “bookseller” rather than Latham “the man”), the book is enriched with juicy personal anecdotes including the occasional gossipy name-dropping.

What shines throughout the book is a love for reading and – unsurprisingly for a “bookseller’s tale” – a love for physical books, as opposed to electronic books. I am not, personally, a purist in this regard, believing that it is ultimately the content of the book, rather than the medium, is more important. Not that you’d notice that, as I’m still an obsessive buyer of physical books and share the compulsion felt by some of the author’s customers to hug and smell a new book. I loved in particular Latham’s ode to comfort books. His observation that the most critically acclaimed “literary” books are not necessarily the ones that mean most to the general reader is an eye-opening one and a warning against adopting a patronising approach towards literary tastes.

The Bookseller's Tale feels like a night at the pub with your favourite book buddy and is just as enjoyable.

I'm not sure I am going to be able to do this book justice in my review, because it is just absolutely brilliant. Straightaway the book led me to other books I haven't heard of and now need to read. As well it provided me with an education in book history I was clearly lacking.

I detest folded corners in books and cannot bring myself to write in them either, despite being encouraged to do so by my past tutors. I now learn that folding corners used to be seen as a feminine device and that marginalia used to be a very big thing. It even used to be that people cut their favourite passages out of books and pasted them into commonplace books with their own thoughts. I also learnt (amongst so many other things) that In ancient times libraries were attached to bath houses - and the free browsing of libraries is akin to mindfulness.

It appears books have been treated very shodily at times through the ages. One of the worst I was shocked to read about was in 1535, when the Parlement de Paris banned printing and burned twenty-three people associated with the book trade, not before earlier having order books to be burnt. A real life Farenheit 451.

"The Decameron" is not a book I had heard of, but when I read that in the past it was laid down that it was "not to be lent to women" I thought I needed to know more. It's this kind of snippet that has led me down a rabbit hole looking for books that reference other books and then when I get to the end of the book, I find several pages of sources - more book hunting.

There is so much knowledge in this book and I was reading it until my eyes hurt, I did not want to put it down. Surely this needs to be made into a TV documentary, it would be fascinating. I'm struggling to remember it all, luckily it's in this book and I will be referring to it in the future and re-reading. My favourite part of the book is the section on Bookshops in New York and a quote from my favourite film "You've Got Mail", it doesn't get much better than this.

The author ran the Canterbury Waterstone's bookshop and underneath it was discovered a Roman mosaic. An image that will stay with me is of the author reclining in a hammock suspended over the mosaic floor and then overhearing a customer's query, answering them through the wall. Thus providing the customer with what must have seemed like an outerworld experience, although apparently one customer did think there was a portal to another world within the bookshop anyway. So many anecdotes that were truly entertaining.

This is an eloquently written book with more than a taste of humour that was a pleasure to read. I want to talk to everyone about it now and share all that I've learnt.

I didn’t really know what to expect with this book- fiction or non fiction- but found that it was a mesmerising read. It sums up how I feel for books and I’m sure anyone who is an avid book lover will feel the same. It was so good to read about the history side of things, but also reading about the passion Martin has for books was fascinating.

A fun read that is less salacious gossip from the coal face of book retail but a thoughtful exploration of books & reading through the centuries.
As a former bookseller I'd have possibly liked a few more current stories but this was a delight to read.

Martin Latham covers all aspects of loving books, historical and psychological, in this comprehensive and varied volume. As this type of book is prone to be, it veers from the funny through the interesting to the frankly rather dull. Something for everyone, nonetheless