Bookshop Life
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Meet the gang
Meet the gang Jo Fiction Jo loves people as much as she loves books, and bringing the two together is her favourite thing to do. To achieve this she lives on little sleep and BBQ flavoured hula hoops. She prefers make-believe to reality, reads mostly fiction, hosts Appetite Book Club, and can often be seen with her shopping trolley delivering books or teaching yoga. Jamie Non-Fiction Jamie is our resident witch, yoga teacher and fantasy wizard with a deep love for Terry Pratchett. They read a lot of non-fiction and love giving recommendations, ranging from politics to science to history. They […]
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Love letter to a book
Which book will you choose? Anyone submitting a letter will be entered into a prize draw for a FABER 2026 Diary (winner announced on 20th Feb) Handwritten letters are the best sent and the best received.
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Loyalty Cards
You can earn loyalty points from your first purchase. A £5 purchase gives you 1 point. Once you have accumulated 20 points, we give you a £5 voucher to spend at Red Lion Books. You will be pleased to know that we have tweaked the system to round numbers up in your favour; i.e. a £9.99 book purchase will trigger 2 points. It takes two minutes to set you up with your own card. You can pop in to see us to collect it.
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You will find kindness in the corners of a bookshop
You will possibly find dust in those corners as well but that’s a different blog. There are many ways to purchase a book. Some people don’t feel the safety or the conviviality of a bookshop is for them. They may prefer the anonymity of clicking a button and that’s okay. There are different tribes of people. In our experience there are still lots of people who enjoy visiting a bookshop to buy their books.This is a fortunate fact and it’s why we are still in business. HMV came, went and returned! Debenhams, Woolies and M&S were not able to stick around. […]
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This is your shop
We received the following message from a young customer who was recently won the ‘Top Young Reporter of the Year’ award. Congratulations Rosie It’s Rosie, I’m not sure if you remember me but wrote an article about the shop last Autumn. I was lucky enough to win Top Young Reporter of the Year and also received awards for some of my articles, including my interview with you! I just wanted to say a huge thank you for being so helpful and inviting last year. Your article was by far the one I most enjoyed writing! Thank you again! Rosie Gray https://www.gazette-news.co.uk/news/23134406.its-shop—rosie-gray-colchester-sixth-form/ (I’ve […]
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Yale University Press, Bookshop of the month
A Little History of Yale University Press London Yale University Press, founded in Connecticut in 1908, first established a marketing base in London in 1961, before going on to publish its own list of titles, alongside the books produced by its US head office, in 1973. Yale now has a unique position as the only American university press with a full-scale publishing operation in Europe Red Lion Books is thrilled to be chosen as their bookshop of the month! https://yalebooksblog.co.uk/?p=39333 Working closely with the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, the London office of Yale University Press quickly forged a […]
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What is this ‘Under Wraps’?!
It all started with ‘Jolaokaflod’! This is an Icelandic term, translating to ‘Christmas book flood’ and is used to describe books that are gifted on Christmas Eve. At Red Lion Books we gift-wrapped a book we hoped our customers would love and sold it in the run-up to Christmas. Its purchase came with rules: It had to be a gift to yourself It had to be opened on Christmas Eve You couldn’t post it on social media More on this in an earlier blog! We had so much fun with the idea that we decided to offer […]