18 Bookshops

Anne Scott lectures in literature and has also been a BBC Scotland broadcaster and occasional writer for The Scotsman and The Herald. She studied at Edinburgh and married there, and her son, Mike, is a successful song-writer and musician. When she was nine a bookseller folded a bookmark with a red cord into her newly-purchased book and that was the beginning of her love affair with books and bookshops. Working visits to Ann Arbor and Kansas in the 1980s, and later to New York City, Dublin and Galway, helped define her professional work as an extended study of Irish and American writing.

'It is a work of research, one built to last. Its 20,000 words are beautifully constructed, and not one seems out of place.'-Alan Pattullo, The Scotsman; 'An indispensable guide to bookshops lost and living and an at times moving tribute to impact of the bookshop on the open-minded and inquiring individual.'-Northwords Now