Gallipoli

Yesterday I went to see the brilliant new film about Churchill, The Darkest Hour, Like the stage play, Three Days in May, which covers the same early days of Churchill's premiership, they both indicate that Chamberlain saved Churchill's career when he could so easily have been ousted by a vote of no confidence.

The film does not prevaricate about how much Churchill was disliked and mistrusted, not least by the King, and one of the charges that is held against him is the Gallipoli campaign of the First World War. In the film Churchill (briefly) defends his role in proposing the Gallipoli and Dardanelles campaign.

I first read Alan Moorehead's brillianat Gallipoli when I was a schoolboy in the 1960s so was very pleased to have the opportunity to publish the large print edition when it was reissued with an introduction by Sir Max Hastings to coincide with the centenary of the campaign. 

What Moorehead, regarded as probably the best war correspondent of the second world war, established was that, despite the appalling military errors associated with the campaign, it so nearly succeeded. The Turks were convinced the British navy were about to succeed in breaking through that Consantinople was twice evacuated.

Part of the genius of TE Lawrence was that he understood the importance of intelligence and had sources deep behind enemy lines feeding back vital information. Such intelligence on the Gallipoli peninsular might have changed the course of the war.

Gallipoli is seen as a great Churchill failure but not many people know that at the time of the Armistice in 1918 a new assault on the Dardanelles was being planned by the Royal Navy.

We have both hardback and paperback editions of Alan Moorehead's Gallipoli available here.

Incidentally, the night before seeing The Darkest Hour, I watched a DVD of the film Dunkirk and was greatly disappointed: The Darkest Hour gives a much better account of what the mass evacuation and military disaster entailed.

Amazon Fulfilment for Books and the long tail

In 2013 we shipped our entire stock from our warehouse to various Amazon warehouses around the UK and since then they have undertaken our fulfilment.
This has worked very well for us, and we have no complaints.

Recently, Amazon have decided to charge storage fees for slow moving stock. Some of our stock is very slow moving - that is the very nature of "the long tail" and I cannot really complain.

However, this does give us a slight problem: we want to avoid these charges which come into effect in August, so we are going to have to accept the books back to our premises. However, we no longer have a warehouse, just a house, and my wife is not overjoyed at the prospect of having several hundred books arrive next month.

So to mitigate the problem, and keep the wife happy, we have put all the stock currently held at Amazon on sale at half price and free carriage in the UK.

All the books that are not sold in the sale will revert to full price on 14th August.

Pearson to sell their 47% stake in Penguin Random House

When I worked for Pearson in the 1970s and 1980s it was successful and confident and a really great place to work. Its great strength was its diversification: in fact it was criticised for being, in effect, Lord Cowdray’s personal diversified portfolio, comprising amongst many other things: Chateau Latour, Royal Doulton, Madame Tussauds, Warwick Castle, the Financial Times, Westmister Press, half of The Economist and three iconic publishing imprints: Ladybird, Longman and Penguin.

Longman was at the time the largest and most profitable UK imprint. Amongst their many successful operations were English as a Foreign Language publishing, medical publishing (Churchill Livingstone), and very successful publishing operations throughout Africa and the Middle East. When there were shocks to the system, as there were when, for instance, government failure in Nigeria caused them to default on a £6 million debt, the company could weather the storm because of diversification.

I fear for the modern Pearson which has put almost all its eggs in the US education market. It has sold off the family silver: Royal Doulton, Chessington Zoo and Chateau Latour went long ago, but more recently they have sold the Financial Times, and their share of The Economist. Now they are to sell their 47% stake in the enormous Penguin Random House. Perhaps it will be in safer hands with Bertelsmann.

Louis Bernacchi: Saga of the 'Discovery'

I never knew Louis Bernacchi, my great-uncle, because he died five years before I was born, but I met his widow in 1966 when she visited my grandmother, Louis's sister, in Cambridge.

She was a formidable lady, visiting from Hong Kong with her son, Brook. It was mid-summer and a fine day and we all went to lunch at the Garden House Hotel down Mill Lane because they had a large dining room overlooking the River Cam.

When we got there the dining room was almost empty and the head waiter led us to a dark corner far away from the tables by the window. My grandmother said, "Can't we have one of those tables by the windows?". The head waiter replied, "Madam, we have people coming all the way from London to eat here!" "Well," said Mrs Bernacchi, "we've come all the way from Hong Kong." With a bad grace, the head waiter ushered us to a table in the middle of the dining room. As the first course was being served he came and said to the waiter who was doling out the soup, "Do look after our distinguished guests from overseas!" and abruptly disappeared.

(Incidentally, I went back to the Garden House for dinner about two months later as a guest of a famous London caterer. This time the obsequiousness of that same head waiter was a joy to behold.)

After lunch we walked down to the Scott Polar Research Museum in Lensfield Road, where Louis's diaries are housed. They got out a diary from his first visit to Antarctica in 1898 as a member of the Carsten Borchgrevink expedition. Brook read out at random, aloud, a very forthright entry about an altercation Louis had with Borchgrevink, ending up "well if the cap fits, let him wear it!" The truth of the matter is that this expedition was the first to realise that the six month black out of perpetual winter can have a drastic effect on personalities confined together for so long. (The expedition lasted until 1900 and was the first in which humans overwintered on the continent.)

It is because of his membership of this expedition that the Australians regard Bernacchi as the first Australian antarctic explorer because, although born in Brussels of Italian and Belgian parents, the family emigrated to Australia where his father rented the whole of Maria Island off the coast of Tasmania.

Maria Island is now an uninhabited national park and a luxury four day hike of the island culminates in a night in what was Louis's family home. (see Maria Island Walk)

Louis went to school in Hobart, where he lodged with Field Marshall Montgomery's parents. Montgomery's father was Bishop of Tasmania. (I do not know how Louis got on with the Montgomerys but Field Marshal Montgomery so hated his mother that he refused to go to her funeral.)

There is a marvellous modern statue of Louis on the harbour front at Hobart, (of him taking a self-portrait - the first selfie?), surrounded by dogs and packing crates.

Louis got back to London from Antarctica in 1900 (by that time the family had relocated to England). He published an account of his trip, To the South Polar Regions in 1901, in which he displays an astonishing ability to describe the beauty and awesomeness of this unexplored landscape.

When I first read Sara Wheeler's bestselling travel book, Terra Incognita: Travels in Antarctica I was slightly surprised to see that many of her chapter headings held quotations from Bernacchi's unpublished writing. Several years later I read that, having studied Bernacchi's diaries at the Scott Polar Research Museum, she regarded him as her favourite diarist of the heroic age.

In 1901 Louis was invited by Captain Robert Falcon Scott to join his first expedition to Antarctica on board the RSS Discovery, to replace the physicist who had to drop out due to ill health. Louis made haste to join the expedition in New Zealand. There is a bit of a mystery about this replacement referred to in this brief video of Sir Clement Markham's personal scrapbook. (Markham was the patron of the expedition who appointed Scott to lead it).

The RSS Discovery returned to the United Kingdom in 1904 and in 1906 Louis married Winifred Harris. Captain Scott was the best man at his wedding and during the reception said to him, "Well, Louis, I am looking forward to you coming on my next expedition!" Upon which his formidable bride said "He's not coming," which, under the circumstances, is perhaps just as well.

Louis's book, Saga of the 'Discovery' was published in 1938, a year before war broke out, and Louis died in London in 1942. The book sank almost without trace, and for several decades after the war there was very little interest in books about Antarctica.

In 2001 my family and I were lucky enough to be invited by Discovery Point in Dundee, where the RSS Discovery is now housed as part of a magnificent museum, open 364 days a year, to take part in the Centenary celebrations.

I decided to reissue my great-uncle's book, with the permission of his descendants, in time for the Centenary and took a lot of copies to Dundee the week before the celebrations. Selling the book was a revelation to me, because every single bookshop took stock, even the bargain bookshops. The fine academic shop James Thin, took a dozen copies and the buyer said to me, "How nice to subscribe a book that I know I am going to sell!"

The book has been reissued this year in regular and ebook editions, now with photos and maps from the original edition which, for technical reasons, we were unable to incorporate in our 2001 edition.

But the good news for our large print customers is that we have authorised ReadHowYouWant to do a large print edition which you can find on our website here.

It is a surprisingly good read: our local book group read it, not at my instigation, and I was gratified to find how many enjoyed it so much, and recommended it to friends outside the group.

Guy Garfit guy.garfit@largeprintbookshop.co.uk 

P J Kavanagh

We are sorry to learn of the death of PJ Kavanagh aged 84 on August 26th. 

The Telegraph obituary says "his first literary success came in 1966 with The Perfect Stranger.  Ostensibly an autobiography of his first 27 years, it was informed by the presence of his wife, Sally, who had died suddenly aged only 24, at four in the morning on Midsummer's Day 1958. 'Once you've experienced the infinite significance of another person's life, you feel something of the same for all lives,' he wrote. 'The rest of my life, any sense I can make of it, is a memorial to that.' The book was not sentimental nor self-pitying but vivid, humorous and bent upon describing a world in which the one person who had seemed to make sense of it had been lost. It won the Richard Hillary Memorial Prize."

The book has been in and out of print ever since. In 2009 The Observer wrote "this wonderful memoir is sadly out of print, but it's a great love story, a rites of passage about an aimless young man whose life is transformed by meeting the 'perfect stranger'. Then something happens... A wise, sad, wonderfully written memoir that's ripe for rediscovery. Track down a copy now."

September Publishing have just reissued the book and we are very pleased to have done the large print edition. We have also managed to publish it at the same price as the regular edition, £14.99, something the RNIB is always campaigning for. 

Further details can be found here http://b2l.bz/jfxWAZ

Gallipoli

We are very pleased to announce that we will be publishing Alan Moorehead's classic Gallipoli, with a new introduction by Sir Max Hastings, on May 28th, in large print in both hardback and paperback. 

Prices are still to be decided. We hold World English language rights. This is an exciting new departure for us. So few books are published in large print that we have decided to do our own publishing. 

This book was The Sunday Times book of the year in 1956 and is being comprehensively re-reviewed at the moment. 

Typical of the plaudits are these comments from Germaine Greer in the New Statesman:

"Masterful Gallipoli ... now republished with a thoughtful introduction by Max Hastings ... Alan Moorehead's account of Gallipoli is still the best written. He concentrates on the key players, the commanding officers on both sides and the politicians who were manipulating them."

If you require further information please email: editor@largeprintbookshop.co.uk

September Newsletter

Large Print Selection - September 2014

This months highlights include the latest Jack Reacher novel from Lee Child, the final book in the Kinross trilogy from Christina Courtenay and the touching true story of a woman who turned down $1 million to sell her home for a commercial development and ended up sparking an unlikely friendship with the man charged with building a shopping centre on top of her house in Under One Roof.
All these and many more are available from the Large Print Bookshop.

Now Available:

Personal: A Jack Reacher Novel - Lee Child You can leave the army, but the army doesn't leave you. Not always. Not completely, notes Jack Reacher - and sure enough, the retired military cop is soon pulled back into service. This time, for the State Department and the CIA. Paperback £21.99             Other books by Lee Child

The Care and Management of Lies - Jacqueline Winspear The Care and Management of Lies is a lyrical drama of love struggling to survive in a damaged, fractured world. Paperback £23.50

Monsoon Mists - Christina Courtenay Sometimes the most precious things cannot be bought.... This is the final novel in Christina Courtenay's award winning Kinross series, the sequel to Trade Winds and Highland Storms. Paperback £23.50             Other books by Christina Courtenay

Judy: A Dog in a Million - Damian Lewis Judy, a beautiful liver and white English pointer, and the only animal POW of WWII, truly was a dog in a million. Whether she was dragging men to safety from the wreckage of a torpedoed ship, scavenging food to help feed the starving inmates of a hellish Japanese POW camp, or by her presence alone bringing inspiration, she was cherished and adored by Allied servicemen. Paperback £23.50

Under One Roof: How a Tough Old Woman in a Little Old House Changed My Life - Barry Martin, Philip Lerman The heart-warming true story of the bond between a feisty octogenarian and the man in charge of building a shopping mall on top of her home - which inspired the opening scene of the Pixar movie Up! Paperback £23.50

Classic Fiction Choice:

 

Evelina - Frances Burney The story of a young woman's entry into society, womanhood and love. Paperback £19.50

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When ordering for the quickest delivery, always look out for those titles on our website which are marked as either 'currently in stock' or 'In Stock (usually dispatched in 1-2 working days)'.

Other titles are normally available for dispatch within about 7 - 10 days as we have more stock arriving all the time.

Book Selection August 2014

Large Print Selection - August 2014

Well the summer is here and what with staff holiday and late deliveries last month we didn't get a chance to send our normal email with a selection of books so this month we present a slightly bigger choice than normal with our pick of books from both July and August.
Among those featured is Eeny Meeny, a fantastic debut book by M. J. Arlidge which has been chosen by Richard and Judy as a summer read and one which I (the editor) can say was a thoroughly good read. Other highlights include And the Mountains Echoed which is available again in Large Print and the autobiography of Mary Berry who is once again appearing on our television screens in the new series of The Great British Bake Off on BBC1. All these and many more are available from the Large Print Bookshop.

Now Available:

Dick Francis's Refusal - Felix Francis Six years ago, investigator Sid Halley retired for good. He'd been harassed, beaten, shot, even lost a hand to his investigating business, and enough was enough. For the sake of his wife and new daughter he gave up that life of danger and uncertainty, and he thought nothing would ever lure him back into the game. He thought wrong... Paperback £13.99             Also available Dick Francis's Bloodline

And the Mountains Echoed - Khaled Hosseini A Richard and Judy Summer Read 2014. Afghanistan, 1952. Abdullah and his sister Pari live with their father, Saboor, and stepmother in the village of Shadbagh. To Abdullah, Pari is everything. One day the siblings journey across the desert to Kabul with their father, having no sense of the fate that awaits them there, for the event which unfolds will tear their lives apart. Paperback £14.99

A Perfect Life - Danielle Steel From No.1 bestselling author Danielle Steel comes a heartwarming and inspirational novel about a mother and daughter who face challenges, cope with celebrity, and overcome tragedy while maintaining the outward appearance of, The Perfect Life. Paperback £21.99             Other books by Danielle Steel

Recipe for Life: The Autobiography - Mary Berry Mary has been teaching Britain how to cook for over half a century. Her far-reaching culinary career has taken her from recipe tester and cookery editor, to TV personality on The Great British Bake Off. Paperback £23.50

Eeny Meeny - M. J. Arlidge A Richard and Judy Summer Read 2014. The girl emerged from the woods, barely alive. Her story was beyond belief. But it was true. Every dreadful word of it. Days later, another desperate escapee is found - and a pattern is emerging. Pairs of victims are being abducted, imprisoned then faced with a choice: kill or be killed. Paperback £23.50

Where Memories Go: Why Dementia Changes Everything - Sally Magnusson The Sunday Times Bestseller. Regarded as one of the finest journalists of her generation, Mamie Baird Magnusson's whole life was a celebration of words - words that she fought to retain in the grip of a disease which is fast becoming the scourge of the 21st century. Paperback £23.50

Dead Letter Drop - Peter James Dead Letter Drop is Peter James' first ever novel, originally published in 1981 and available now for the first time in Large Print. Max Flynn, undercover agent, has the unenviable job of spying on his own side. When to kill, who to kill, whether to kill are all questions which have to be answered at great speed if he wants to stay alive. Paperback £23.50

A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal - Ben Macintyre Master storyteller Ben Macintyre's most ambitious work to date brings to life the twentieth century's greatest spy story. Kim Philby was the greatest spy in history, a brilliant and charming man who rose to head Britain's counterintelligence against the Soviet Union during the height of the Cold War - while he was secretly working for the enemy. Paperback £21.49             Other books by Ben Macintyre

Peas and Queues - Sandi Toksvig The award-winning Radio 4 broadcaster and writer offers advice and guidance on the social pitfalls of everyday life. How do you get rid of unwanted guests? What do you do if there's a racket in the quiet carriage? How should you eat peas, and behave in queues? Paperback £23.50

Classic Fiction Choice:

 

The Last of the Mohicans - James Fenimore Cooper Cooper's most enduringly popular novel combines heroism and romance with powerful criticism of the destruction of nature and tradition. Paperback £19.50             Other books by James Fenimore Cooper

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When ordering for the quickest delivery, always look out for those titles on our website which are marked as either 'currently in stock' or 'In Stock (usually dispatched in 1-2 working days)'.

Other titles are normally available for dispatch within about 7 - 14 days as we have more stock arriving all the time.

June Newsletter

Large Print Selection - June 2014

The selection this month includes a new novel from the ever popular Jojo Moyes, The One Plus One, a great psychological crime novel from Sophie Hannah and the inside story on the discovery of Richard III's grave. All these and many more are available from the Large Print Bookshop.

Now Available:

The One Plus One - Jojo Moyes The One Plus One is the beautiful, poignant and utterly compelling new novel by the internationally bestselling author Jojo Moyes. One single mum. With two jobs and two children, Jess Thomas does her best day after day. But it's hard on your own. And sometimes you take risks you shouldn't. Because you have to... Paperback £23.50             Other books by Jojo Moyes

Lasting Damage - Sophie Hannah It’s 1.15 a.m. Connie Bowskill should be asleep. Instead, she’s logging on to a property website in search of a house she saw earlier. Soon Connie is clicking on the ‘Virtual Tour’ button, keen to see inside the house. She finds herself looking at a scene from a nightmare: in the living room, there’s a woman lying face down in a huge pool of blood... Paperback £23.50             Other books by Sophie Hannah

Flight to Coorah Creek - Janet Gover Only Jessica Pearson knows the truth when the press portray her as the woman who betrayed her lover to escape prosecution. But will her new job flying an outback air ambulance help her sleep at night or atone for a lost life? Paperback £23.50

The King's Grave: The Search for Richard III - Philippa Langley, Michael Jones Discover the official inside story of the life, death and remarkable discovery of history’s most controversial monarch. Paperback £23.50

Bonkers: My Life in Laughs - Jennifer Saunders Jennifer Saunders' comic creations have brought joy to millions. From Comic Strip to Comic Relief, from Bolly-swilling Edina in Ab Fab to her takes on Madonna or Mamma Mia, her characters are household names. But it's Jennifer herself who has a place in all our hearts. This is her funny, moving and frankly bonkers memoir, filled with laughter, friends and occasional heartache - but never misery. Paperback £23.50

Classic Fiction Choice:

 

Plain Tales From the Hills - Rudyard Kipling Kipling’s early short stories of the Raj are collected here, creating vivid imagery of the sights and smells of India. Paperback £19.50

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When ordering for the quickest delivery, always look out for those titles on our website which are marked as either 'currently in stock’ or 'In Stock (usually dispatched in 1-2 working days)'.

Other titles are normally available for dispatch within about 7 - 10 days as we have more stock arriving all the time.

Large Print Selection - May 2014

Large Print Selection - May 2014

This month our hightlights include the The White Princess from Philippa Gregory, the author of The White Queen which became a hughly popular BBC TV series last year. Other books of interest are the lastest DI Banks novel from Peter Robinson and the true story of Malala, the young girl shot by the Taliban for standing up for the right to education for girls. All these and many more are available from the Large Print Bookshop.

Now Available:

Gone Girl - Gillian Flynn Flynn's toxic mix of sharp-edged wit with deliciously chilling prose creates a nerve-fraying thriller that confounds readers at every turn. When his wife disappears on their anniversary, Nick starts having cringe-worthy daydreams and becomes oddly evasive, eschewing his golden boy past. Paperback £14.99             Other books by Gillian Flynn

The White Princess - Philippa Gregory The haunting story of the mother of the Tudors, Elizabeth of York, wife to Henry VII. Beautiful eldest daughter of Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville - the White Queen - the young princess Elizabeth faces a conflict of loyalties between the red rose and the white. Paperback £15.49             Other books by Philippa Gregory

Witness the Night - Kishwar Desai Winner of the Costa First Novel Award In a small town in the heart of India, a young girl, barely alive, is found tied to a bed inside a townhouse where 13 people lie dead. The girl is alive, but only just... Paperback £23.50

Children of the Revolution - Peter Robinson Ex-college lecturer Gavin Miller is found dead; his distorted body strewn across a disused railway track near his home. There’s no sign of a struggle, and no concrete evidence except for one distinguishing package: £5,000 of cash, tucked inside the man’s pocket. Paperback £23.50             Other books by Peter Robinson

I Am Malala - Malala Yousafzai When the Taliban took control of the Swat Valley, one girl spoke out. Malala Yousafzai refused to be silenced and fought for her right to an education. On Tuesday 9th October 2012, she almost paid the ultimate price. Shot in the head at point blank range while riding the bus home from school. Paperback £23.50

Classic Fiction Choice:

 

Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte Bold and unique, Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights is a heartbreaking tale of love, loss and vengeance, that has become a masterpiece of English literature. Paperback £19.50

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When ordering for the quickest delivery, always look out for those titles on our website which are marked as either 'currently in stock’ or 'In Stock (usually dispatched in 1-2 working days)'.

Other titles are normally available for dispatch within about 7 - 10 days as we have more stock arriving all the time.

Large Print Selection - April 2014

Large Print Selection - April 2014

Our selection this month includes the book of the fantastic Momuments Men which was partly filmed just down the road from us at the Imperial War Museum in Duxford, a wonderful biography of celebrity chef Rick Stein and a great new book from Danielle Steel. All these and many more are available from the Large Print Bookshop.

Now Available:

The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History - Robert M. Edsel What if I told you that there was an epic story about World War II that has not been told, involving the most unlikely group of heroes? What if I told you there was a group of men on the front lines who didn’t carry machine guns or drive tanks; a new kind of soldier, one charged with saving, not destroying. From caves to castles in a thrilling race against time, these men risked their lives daily to save hundreds of thousands of the world’s greatest works of art. Paperback £23.50

Under A Mackerel Sky - Rick Stein Rick Stein’s childhood in 1950s North Cornwall was idyllic. But ever-present was the unpredictable mood of his bipolar father. When Rick was 18 his father killed himself. Emotionally adrift, Rick left for Australia, carrying a suitcase stamped with his father’s initials. Manual labour in the outback followed by adventures in America and Mexico toughened up the naive public schoolboy. Eventually, Cornwall called him home. Paperback £23.50

Doctor Sleep - Stephen King Stephen King returns to the character and territory of one of his most popular novels ever, The Shining, in this instantly riveting novel about the now middle-aged Dan Torrance and the very special twelve-year-old girl he must save from a tribe of murderous paranormals. Paperback £23.50             Other books by Stephen King

Hanns and Rudolf: The German Jew and the Hunt for the Kommandant of Auschwitz - Thomas Harding Shortlisted for The Costa Biography Award, this is the true story of Hanns Alexander, the son of a prosperous German family who fled Berlin in the 1930s and became the Kommandant of Auschwitz Concentration Camp. Paperback £23.50

Power Play - Danielle Steel In Northern California two successful CEOs are both indispensable to their growing companies' futures. Both are brilliant at the power game. But the difference between them is huge. One is a man, the other a woman. In this riveting novel, Danielle Steel explores what that means as she takes readers into the rarefied world of those at the pinnacle of international business and reveals the irrevocable choices they make, what drives them, and how others perceive them. Paperback £21.99             Other books by Danielle Steel

Classic Fiction Choice:

 

The Riddle of the Sands - Erskine Childers Childers' lone masterpiece, The Riddle of the Sands, considered the first modern spy thriller, is recognisable as the brilliant forerunner of the realism of Graham Greene and John le Carre. Its unique flavour comes from its fine characterization, richly authentic background of inshore sailing and vivid evocation of the late 1890s - an atmosphere of mutual suspicion and intrigue that was soon to lead to war. Paperback £19.50

Large Print News

Heartbleed Bug - You may have heard a lot in the media about the Heartbleed bug. We can confirm that our systems have now been fully patched to make sure we are not vulnerable to this. It is also worth noting that as we do not store any payment card details this in general makes us a much less attractive prospect for any hackers. If you want to know more about this bug and if it affects other sites you use then there is a very good What You Need to Know article on the BBC which can be accessed by clicking here.

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When ordering for the quickest delivery, always look out for those titles on our website which are marked as either 'currently in stock’ or 'In Stock (usually dispatched in 1-2 working days)'.

Other titles are normally available for dispatch within about 7 - 10 days as we have more stock arriving all the time.