Royalties to be awarded for secondhand book sales

A new collaboration between UK booksellers and authors’ societies will mean that for the first time, writers will receive royalties on secondhand/used book sales. World of Books, the UK’s largest seller of used books, estimates the market for used books in the UK to be growing at 12% per year and will be worth £563 million within four years.

The scheme is called AuthorSHARE and was thought up by William Pryor, chairman of Bristol-based Bookbarn International which sells new, used, and rare books. “As a writer as well as founder of Bookbarn, I was puzzled that authors, the very people who create the raw material of our business, were not benefiting,” he said.

More details at Fine Books magazine

Hexagonal bookshelf seat

 

Tanishka Sharma

Revolving Bookcase 'Ariel'

 

This luxurious revolving bookcase in black walnut is softly nostalgic with a smooth modern revolving mechanism with apertures sized for modern paperbacks. Two sides of the cabinet have shelves extending along its full length to display the book spines whilst the two other sides have apertures to display the book covers. The cabinet rotates on a turntable mechanism which is attached to a solid walnut base. Ariel, a biography of Percy Shelley by Andre Maurois was one of ten titles chosen for the launch of Penguin paperbacks in 1935. The name Ariel apparently comes from the boat which Shelley designed and which was sank off the coast of Italy, leading to his death. Dimensions: 45cm x 45cm x 65c.

Heliconia

Chopped tree bookshelf

Small bookshelf interpreting the moment when the tree trunk is cut and falls to the ground, transforms a structure that initially looks stiff and essential, in a flexible, mobile and lively piece of furniture composed of four elements that can be stacked and fixed to each others, or used individually.

Lenka Czereova

 

Charles I's travelling library

Like a 17th century version of a Kindle. Two red leather cases, designed in the 1970s by Sangorski and Sutcliffe to look like two large books, open up to reveal 59 small volumes covering just about everything that a wealthy educated gentleman would want to read on his travels. Charles I's travelling library was acquired through a bequest. The collection of tiny books have gold-tooled bindings and some are believed to have been signed by the Prince himself. Titles include classical texts by the poet Ovid and the philosopher Cicero as well as bibles and religious books such as De Imitatione Christi by Thomas A Kempis. 

British Library

 

Bookette

 Michelle Johansen

Shelf Isolation

Shelf Isolation is one of Phil Shaw's distinctive bookshelf works, in which he arranges a series of genuine book-titles in an artfully-constructed digital bookcase, so that when you read them in order, from left to right, they spell out an unexpected narrative and a much needed message of hope.

Rebecca Hossack Art Gallery