Bookworm: ‘I wandered into a chain book store and wondered when it had been taken over by pornographers’

WINTERSON’S WITCHES

ALTHOUGH the Book Festival programme lists Jeanette Winterson as discussing her recent memoir, she is about to publish another book next month, The Daylight Gate, about the Pendle Witches (the 400th anniversary of that particularly gruesome episode in Jacobean history falls this year).

It’s a classic topic for Winterson to investigate: demonised femininity; religious intolerance; how myth is folded inside the everyday. Even more intriguingly, it is published by Hammer, a new imprint initiative from Arrow Books and Exclusive Media, who now own the Hammer brand. Hopefully this is the first of many future collaborations between literary writers and the legendary horror studio, and I’m tempted to wonder what might come next? Martin Amis’s version of Frankenstein Created Woman? James Kelman’s Mutiny On The Buses? Or Louise Welsh taking on Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde?

ECLECTIC LIST

ALTHOUGH the Edinburgh Book Festival hasn’t yet begun, the programme for the Stirling Off The Page festival has just been announced.

Running from 8-15 September, it features – among favourites such as Julia Donaldson, James Robertson and Ian Rankin – a launch event with Billy Letford, one of the most interesting young poets to emerge in Scotland in recent years; Shari Low and Carmen Reid on chick-lit (a genre yet to infiltrate the hallowed fences of Charlotte Square) and Andy Briggs on updating Tarzan for the jungle yodeller’s centenary.

In addition, Sally Magnusson will be discussing what unites Vermeer, Harris Tweed, gunpowder, beer foam and amateur gas-masks (answer: urine). Her book The Life Of Pee tells all.

GREY AREA

WITH a few minutes to spare before catching a train, I wandered into a chain book store and wondered when it had been taken over by pornographers. With 50 kinds of Fifty Shades cash-ins, knock-offs, parodies and DIY books, it has never been as depressing to be in  a bookshop.

Luckily, I discovered an almost hidden second-hand bookshop in the Borders – www.theborder-reader.co.uk – which restored my faith in the idea that bookshops might contain hidden treasures you didn’t know you wanted until you started browsing.