Emma gave me this book for my birthday in 2023 and when I heard that Robin Ince was coming to do an event at the Kings Heath Music and Book Festival, organised by The Heath Bookshop among others, I picked it off the shelf to read. Come the event, last Thursday, I hadn’t quite finished it – as I wanted to take it to get it signed anyway, I sat there slightly self-consciously in the audience before he started and finished it off! Out of the seven books I received for that birthday, I’ve read and reviewed five, not bad! And of course it counts towards my TBR project, too.

Robin Ince – “Bibliomaniac: An Obsessive’s Tour of the Bookshops of Britain”

(21 January 2023, from Emma)

An excellent combination of a book about bookshops and a “quest” book, we read about Ince’s journey by public transport and the odd lift around over 100 bookshops in the UK in 100 days. There’s a section on each town and we also get to hear about the charity shops of the area and what he buys, and his increasingly heavy bags of books he drags around – very familiar from my trips to Hay, or, to be honest, my own high street on occasion.

I marked up references to the bookshops I knew, including The Edge of the World in Penzance, the Hospice charity shop in Stratford and The Cinema Bookshop in Hay. There appears to be a new one in my own town of origin! He does an event in Birmingham (and has a bit of a funny turn on the confusing roads) but has to do it at ThinkTank (which has a bookshop?!) because The Bookshop wasn’t open then, so it’s lovely he returned there for this event (he also bought a copy of this book in The Shop and a little pile in Oxfam Books, sadly none that I’d donated there myself!).

There were laughs – being in Stratford and getting trapped in inventing punning shop names; he apparently still gets tweets with ideas, years later – and poignant moments as he spends time with his elderly dad in lockdown: his dad passed last year and the event was on what would have been his birthday so there was sad stuff among the funny and science bits, although as he said we’re the better for talking about such things. A bit of a scattershot review, sorry, very entertaining and worthwhile as a guide to bookshops to find in various towns; his events are a blast of associations and chains of thought but he seems like a lovely chap and gave my friend a hug during his signing at the end when she got sad about lost dads.

This is Book 26 in my 2024 TBR project – 115 to go!