Good to be back at the Old Bell in Malmesbury. Good supper, good breakfast – wifi not quite up to the mark for blogging purposes, but perhaps that’s no bad thing.
No need for swimming today. Tetbury first stop and just being out in the soft-teeming, seeping, drenching Gloucestershire rain is like being underwater. Three books bought damply.
Keogh’s Bookshop in Nailsworth
Still raining in Nailsworth – more books bought in Keogh’s.
Keogh’s Bookshop in Nailsworth
Still raining in Stroud – and an ominous queue of traffic trying to leave town. “Hello Stroud” on behalf of John Critchley.
Inprint in Stroud
Delighted by Inprint on the High Street – home of the excellent online TheBookGuide. Well done to them – a quirky and highly visual bookshop where you sense that everything has been chosen and not simply acquired.
Inprint in Stroud
Can’t find anyone else at home in the area, but all roads out of Stroud now appear to be gridlocked. We engineer a highly circuitous route to Christopher Saunders at Newnham-on-Severn. A battle of wills with Jane the (borrowed) sat-navigator ends with The First Lady reminding me somewhat tartly that it’s not a competition to find the most obscure route.
The Christopher Saunders Pimm’s Jug
Mightily impressed by Christopher’s new garden water-feature cascading down to the river – and possibly even more so by the exceedingly pretty girl he appears to have hired to clean and polish his shrubs. Whether in our honour or not is not made entirely clear. She’s paid by the hour and not by the leaf, he tells us somewhat obscurely, as if it were something perfectly normal, like collating.
Good books – really good books – in his field. Good talk. Ideas for a fair. High praise of the ABA handbook as an instrument of reassurance when dealing with anxious sellers.
Combined Bookshop and Post Office found by the wayside – neither open in mid-afternoon
And Jane is tacitly turned off as we follow the ‘Saunders scenic’ route to Hay.
The Bookhunter on Safari 
I do congratulate the President and the First Lady, not to mention Jane, on their noble and sacrificial (to a holiday in sunnier climes) tour of the more western outposts of bookselling Britain. I cannot wait for the blog on their trips north and east which will no doubt follow during the course of a year, or two. I found myself gripped and shamed at one and the same time. I shall endeavour to go visiting fellow booksellers in and around my patch pronto – just as soon as August shows herself to be a summery month – currently it’s pouring with rain here in Dorset.
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Thank you very much, Julian. The least we can do in these difficult times is to support each other as best we can – by talking, communicating and visiting. And in any case, we all love going into bookshops – it’s what we were born for after all. All best. The north-west beckons next week.
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