The Curious Case of Côte d'Azur

By Katherine Soltane

As the summer season has finally approached, it has brought some amazing opportunities for starting creating our own exciting new experiences.

Just last month I have been exploring the amazing French Riviera and it was one one of the most magnifique experiences of Art De Vivre!

I would like to share this experience with our selection of photographs capturing the real beauty of Côte d’Azur:

Nice, South of France

Cannes, South of France

Monaco, Principality of Monaco

If you would like to find out more information about France, explore our Speak The Culture: France guide by clicking on the link below:
http://bit.ly/bG7VMF

If you are interested in exploring any other European countries, please see our Speak The Culture range by clicking on the link below:
http://bit.ly/jTCcMo

'Frank Baynes- A Life Beyond the Sea' Book Launch

Frank Baines – A Life Beyond the Sea

The author Frank Baines returned to haunt his former home in the North Essex town of Coggeshall for the launch of Brian Mooney’s biography – Frank Baines: A Life Beyond the Sea (Thorogood) – and to celebrate the publication of Chindit Affair (Pen & Sword), Frank’s posthumously-published account of his wartime in experiences in Burma.

More than 100 guests were present at the event, which was held in the walled garden behind the elegant Regency house which was Frank’s home for some 30 years.
The two books unravel the many lives of Frank, who was at different times a sailor, soldier, Hindu monk, author and traveller. He was also gay and a social rebel. After cycling back to India in his early sixties, he returned to Coggeshall, where he died in an alms house in 1987.

The guests at the launch included Richard Rhodes James, the last surviving officer who fought alongside Frank with General Orde Wingate’s Chindits behind enemy lines in Burma in 1944.

Angela Spall was there for Thorogood.

Author Brian Mooney, who now lives in Frank’s former house, stumbled across the unpublished account of Frank’s wartime experiences when he was writing his biography.

‘It was an amazing discovery, just one of many I made about Frank as I researched his life,’ says Brian. ‘The manuscript had been lying on the shelves of the local solicitor’s office for almost a quarter of a century.’

Brian’s biography brings together for the first time all the aspects of Frank’s life and reveals his highly unusual family background. In addition, the book reproduces some of Frank’s early work as a journalist in Calcutta and includes the full account of his bicycle journey back to India at the age of 62.

Chindit Affair relates the story of 111 Brigade which was commanded by the future author John Masters. More than 2,000 men were dropped into Northern Burma to engage the Japanese from the rear. Five months later there were only about 100 men left fit to fight. Frank was one of them. He tells of the horrors and privations of jungle warfare – and of his unconventional intimate relationship with one of his Gurkha riflemen.

By birth Frank Baines was a son of Cornwall – but his later life revolved round Essex, and it is out of Essex that these two fascinating books have come.

The endless opportunities for Waterstones

Waterstone’s now has a new owner (Russian oligarch Alexander Mamut) and new MD (leading independent bookseller James Daunt). Interestingly (perhaps tellingly) Mr Daunt has indicated that his eponymous small chain will remain separate.

Reported as having ‘a strong belief in the cultural importance of book stores’, how will they fare in this challenging era of bookselling, when bookshops are subject to the pressures of:

1. Supermarkets
2. The internet
3. E-books
4. A less ‘bookish’ society
5. Tough trading conditions in the economy as a whole
6. Rents at levels which are economically unsustainable (and at odds with problems on the high street – landlords cannot get their heads round the fact that rents need to come down considerably)

What do I think Waterstone’s new team should look at doing?

1. Creating a more pleasurable in-store experience (a bit more like Ottakar’s, the chain that HMV/Waterstones swallowed up). As Mary Portas would say – you have to make people want to shop at Waterstone’s and not just think ‘I could get that cheaper at Amazon’

2. Working to ensure the public can trust what Waterstone’s does and that it is merit alone which lies behind its own buying and promotional policy (for example it must prove that its window and other displays are not simply a result of publishers paying for prominence).

3. Reducing the number of copies of some titles being out on display at positions all over the shop (= the shameless over-promotion of key titles) and stop competing with the supermarkets.

4. Recognizing and embracing that e-books exist and set up a service accordingly.

5. Stopping the selling of stationery and gifts.

6. Introducing small publishers tables.

7. Trying to sponsor new titles.

8. Moving away from the over-rigid categorisation of titles and making displays more relaxed and eclectic.

9. End fixed times when Waterstone’s makes book selection decisions, which causes invidious comparisons and only goes to guarantee the dominance of big publishers.

10. Franchise small town stores to local managers so that local interests can better be served.

Out of all of these, the one that could make a big impact is the honesty/trust one. Book retailers should be more transparent and either end the practice altogether, or be totally open about the fact that the publishers who pay more get stocked and displayed more. Waterstone’s should become the hero of the book-buying public and the scourge of other booksellers that do not match their new high standards (eg come out and be honest WHSmith about the workings of the Richard and Judy Book Club).

And what about Waterstone’s awards for new authors or specialist publishers?!

Let’s see what happens…….

Neil Thomas

'2011 London Book Fair' by Andrew Whittaker

The growth of digital

There was a certain end-of-term informality about the final day of the 2011 London Book Fair (LBF) on Wednesday. After 72 hours of meetings, greetings and tweetings, the exhibitors drew breath and by and large seemed to call it a success (and a welcome tonic to last year’s ash cloud disappointments).

I spent the day meeting with the aggregators that help Thorogood sell their books in digital format around the world. In common, they talked about how rapidly the ebooks market is evolving; both in terms of buying habits and in the processes used for converting books to digital format.

We’ve been selling PDF files of Thorogood titles for some time. And now we’re adding epub format files to the catalogue – so that Thorogood books can be read on ebook reading devices like the Kindle and its competing cousins. For us, and for the rest of the publishing world, the next big leap forward lies in adapting more visually-led books for the digital world. Art books, graphic novels and titles like our own Speak the Culture series are much harder to marry with the demands of digital.

However, there were firms at LBF promoting new software that purported to do the job. So, envisage a book displayed rather like a glorified app – one that can bolster content with video clips, audio and links, and which can display rich artwork and photographs within the flow of the text. Sounds impressive – and the samples I saw were very promising indeed. It remains to be seen whether the book buying public will accept the reduction of their weighty, elegant design-led books down to an electronic image in quite the same way that they seem to be doing with text.

Andrew Whittaker

Spring Break

Happy Spring/Easter break – and for Twitter followers – Happy Tweaster, Tweetsters!!

Easter is the first real chance of the year to grab a holiday. A lot of people do just that and head off to the slopes or the sun, to the country or the coast.

It gives a chance to ‘recharge your batteries’, as we like to describe the process of emotional rebalancing that a break from work can provide.

As well as a physical change in routine and the variation that a change of location can provide to the senses, it is worth thinking of topping up mental reserves through the effects of good books! It doesn’t matter whether you are Kindle-ing or paper-ing your reading – they all count.

Reading does affect mental well-being – a recent letter in The Times pointed out that in cases of mental health problems, doctors would do well do ask patients how many books they were reading – and on the answer, ‘none!’ they should suggest that it would help to read more.

So, if holidays can give a physical rest, then mental reconnection is just as important. And why not look at ways of improving your approach to life?

Two books this year that have given me pleasure in this dimension are:
How to Live:Or a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Answers by Sarah Bakewell – a literary tart of a name, you could say; and How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain de Botton – who usually hits the right philosophical ‘button’.

Oh! And if you want anything to sharpen your business thinking and freshen up your thought processes for the return to the office, then anything published by Thorogood would help – maybe for starters anything written by Barrie Pearson or by John Adair.

Neil Thomas

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