The Aardvark Blog
London Book Fair, Building a Library-'Quartet for the End of Time', Books Books Books!
London Book Fair, Building a Library-'Quartet for the End of Time', Books Books Books!
Ethel Aardvark spent two very interesting days at the London Book Fair this week taking the temperature of the book trade, and I myself had a flying visit on Thursday. Amazingly the booktrade seems to be in reasonable health, albeit with no few clouds on the horizon. Ethel said that the Fair was a wonderful international melting-pot of authors and publishers, and the Booksellers' Association kindly hosted her presence there this year. We bought our usual large haul of art and decorative arts books which are now back at base, and the next week will be spent putting them into stock.
Yesterday's CD Review contained a piece in 'Building a Library' on 'The Quartet for the End of Time' by Olivier Messiaen. Since my first hearing of this piece at a lunchtime coffee concert at the Wigmore Hall many years ago, the Quartet has remained one of my favourite pieces of music and an ever present in my notional 'Desert Island Disc' selection. The passages for the Clarinet and the haunting last solo Violin movement are in my opinion amongst the finest pieces of music ever written. I have been lucky also to hear the piece played at both the Presteigne and Arcadia Festivals, and was as ever impressed by the quality of the analysis on BaL. How marvellous Radio 3 can be. It will be available as a podcast shortly.
A huge thank you to Shannon Donovan for all her work on 'Fire and Earth'. We are about to send the catalogue to the setters and publicity is building for the exhibition itself which starts on the 8th April, and runs to Sunday 23rd April. It should be a stupendous show and I would urge anyone interested in ceramics to come and see it.
But we are not just overwhelmed with art books, as this week I have also bought a lot of modern fiction, local books on the Marches and much more. Why not pop in to browse some of our latest acquisitions?
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