But do you know what’s really cool? Yesterday Boyfriend and I were wandering in London, and we ended up here. It’s the shop! The Black Books shop! And it’s really a bookshop too!

Unfortunately it was also a closed bookshop. But in the window there was this little beauty: what looks like an early edition of The Waves by Virginia Woolf.

I did also manage to visit an open bookshop while I was in the area. The London Review Bookshop on Bury Place (the Black Books shop is on Leigh Street). I was very good and didn’t buy a thing, though there was much to be tempted by. I’m trying to restrain my book buying self at least until after Christmas.

… towards the end of last year there was a meeting of writers and Waterstone’s staff at the Piccadilly branch, organised by the Society of Authors. It was a well-intentioned and profoundly depressing experience. When Wendy Cope asked about the sale of poetry, she was answered after a long, embarrassed pause by the very nice woman who looks after non-fiction. Deborah Moggach asked a question or two and learned that literary fiction was not on the whole welcome in the shop. In fact, the word “literary” is death to sales – and perhaps literary biography is worst of all.

I really hope this apparent trend doesn’t perpetuate. Over the last couple of years I’ve really discovered literary biographies as a genre and when I’ve not been knee-deep in uni work I’ve been enjoying them immensely. Indeed, I’m currently frustratingly close to the end of The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft by Claire Tomalin. I’ve only about 70 pages to go, but That Damned Essay just keeps getting in the way. It’s brilliant, by the way, and unless the last 70 pages are so unspeakably awful that it ruins the entire book – and I doubt that will be the case – I have absolutely no hesitation in recommending it to all you interested in one of the greatest figures in feminist/women’s history.

But why does the word ‘literary’ strike such fear into the hearts of some readers? I must say that the word actually sells me the book, rather than dissuades me from buying it. Perhaps I am preaching to the converted in the blogosphere, but how many people really find the concept so scary? Is it that they feel the book will be “too clever” for them… or do they feel that literature is too elitist? I must say that it’s never struck me as such, but maybe I’m an exception. It’s an interesting question, I think, and I’d love to hear your views on it.

Incidentally, Michael Holroyd’s most recent book A Strange Eventful History: The Dramatic Lives of Ellen Terry, Henry Irving and Their Remarkable Families looks utterly marvellous and I’m desperate for a copy. But not this side of the essay and the dissertation, I fear. You can read the whole of Holroyd’s Guardian piece here.

Heffer’s is on the right there, with Trinity College on the left. What an amazing place. We walked for miles too – so much to see! And it was fantastic to hang out with Lauren again, and I have missed her terribly since she moved there. Between Heffer’s and Galloway and Porter, I picked up some booky bargains too: Victorian Sensation: Or the Spectacular, the Shocking, and the Scandalous in Nineteenth-Century Britain by Michael Diamond; The Truest Form of Patriotism: Pacifist Feminism in Britain, 1870-1902 by Heloise Brown; and The Virago Book of Women and the Great War, edited by Joyce Marlow. I also picked up a cheap copy of a Pink Floyd biography – Pigs Might Fly by Mark Blake – for my Beloved.

Meanwhile, today, back in Oxford, there is lots of snow. My office is the coldest place on earth, or so it feels like. Have never been more thankful for woollens.