Camilla, Adrian and Kate went to Axel Scheffler’s exhibition and sale of art at glorious independent book shop, Daunt Books, in Marylebone High Street (Axel signing, pictured).
Brilliant paper engineer, Nick Denchfield was there with illustrators Ant Parker and Helen Cowcher. Lots of old publishing friends were there including Ian Craig (ex Random House, now the wilds of Scotland), Alison Green (Alison Green Books, Scholastic), Lisa Edwards (Scholastic) and Louise Bolongaro (Penguin) together with journalists and literary agents and scouts.
It was, as always, a huge pleasure to see gruffalos, witches, ducks, rabbits and geese in all their original artwork glory.
A bunch of us went out for pizza afterwards – and Axel’s daughter, Adelie (two and a half) – joined us, and, frankly, was less tired than the rest of us by the end of the evening.
Today, Kate was interviewed by Anja Steig of Buchreport, Germany’s book industry magazine: it’s great to think that she chose Nosy Crow as one of the people she wanted to talk to while she was here: tomorrow, she’s interviewing Dominic Myers, MD of Waterstones.
Waterstones will be important to Nosy Crow when we start selling books next year, but here’s an interesting and not altogether cheering US book industry statistic reported by Jane Friedman (@JaneFriedman) from BEA (Book Expo America) today: 7% of books published generate 87% of sales and 93% of all published books sell less than 1,000 copies each.
