Reader! Read Faster! bestseller awards for February 2013

The inaugural Reader! Read Faster! bestseller awards span the digestive system, law textbooks and a debut from a Manchester-based novelist.

We publish the bestsellers for Blackwell's Manchester on this blog because, ultimately, if you are buying the books, there is no better recommendation. You can read the bestsellers here. We split them into top five fiction, top five academic books and top five gift & stationery items. In addition to listing our top five top books, for the first time in February we also now give awards for particularly strong performances.

We give a FASTEST! award to the absolute bestsellers of the month: books that did much better than we expected because you, the reader, can't get enough of them. In our February bestseller list, this award goes to The Digestive System by Margaret E. Smith, Dion G. Morton, and to Tort Law by Kirsty Horsey & Erika Rackley.

Our FAST! award is for those just behind the leaders, books that still did incredibly well. Think of it as a 'commended' accolade. For February, this goes to Ten Things I've Learnt About Love by Sarah Butler and to Public Law by Mark Elliott & Robert Thomas.

Well done to all. Oh, what do the authors win? Satisfaction, flattery and a tiny sprinkling of smugness!

A possible rebranding of World Book Day

Or possibly not.

We've been out delivering World Book Day books to schools recently. All that travelling has possibly been doing funny things to our mind.

Editor's note:
It seems that the popular opinion of our booksellers here is that this is the worst post Reader! Read Faster! has ever done. Of particular disappointment is the attempt to pun "March" with "mallard" on the spine of the red book. It is the most brazen attempt at punnery since Shakespeare wedged a "grave" joke into Mercutio's dying comments. Blackwell's Manchester would like to apologise to, er, itself for letting itself down. We promise to have 97% fewer duck puns in future.

The red is dead: our new look blog

Welcome to our new-look blog.

The angry, tabloid red of our previous design has gone. And although we've kept the same Blogger template,  we've made it look all fancy and that. Well. As fancy as Blogger can get. Oh and we're not capitalising the titles of blog posts any more because posting to Twitter is annoying.

If you're really clever, you'll notice the colours of the University of Manchester and Manchester Metropolitan University in our design.

We've kept the name, which, let us not forget, is stolen shamelessly from Driver Drive Faster whose keyboardist can be spotted on our ground floor running our fiction department. Here they are performing at Sounds From The Other City.

 

ALMOST LIZARD LAUNCH LATEST

Our event on Friday 15 March has two new things. A shortened URL and a poster! Woo! Do come and support James Higgerson's first novel launch - you also get Sam Mills, Rodge Glass and Chris Killen too, all for the price of nothing!

Do share. The Facebook event is here.

Here's the Twitter-friendly URL:

tiny.cc/lizardz

And here's the poster: Click for bigger.

FIFTY SHADES AUTHOR DUMPS ACADEMIA

Don't know if anyone caught the story in the Guardian the other day about EL James and her next book, but it's worth a read.

Click here for a readable size.

ARREST MACHIAVELLI!

Why did we miss this one? Stephen Milner, professor of Italian at the University of Manchester, has discovered an arrest warrant for the Prince of Darkness himself, Niccolò Machiavelli.

The Prof found the document by accident while researching town criers of Florence. Macca, as he wasn't known to his friends, was done for conspiring against the the Medici., thrown in prison and tortured.  This (above) is the warrant for that arrest in 1513. After release, Machiavelli legged it to small village outside Florence to write The Prince.

It just shows what you can find if you have a bit of a tidy... More on the Telegraph website.

THE ALMOST LIZARD LAUNCH: JAMES HIGGERSON, SAM MILLS, RODGE GLASS, CHRIS KILLEN

Short URL to this blog post: tiny.cc/lizardz
Join the Facebook event

An exciting new novelist will launch his debut in Blackwell's in March alongside a stellar line-up of authors.

James Higgerson is a cat-owning Manchester PhD student who was runner-up in the Luke Bitmead Bursary Award. The Almost Lizard (Legend Press 2013) is his debut and is a story of modern mental illness in a media-obsessed society. Our event on Friday 15 March will be the book's official launch.

Support will come from three massively exciting authors:

Sam Mills' debut novel The Quiddity of Will Self was longlisted for Not the Booker prize and is an "ingenious, energetic read" (Sunday Times). Sam is a former chess journalist and has contributed to 3am and The Guardian. As one of the founding members of the Will Self Club, Sam rose to the position of Sovereign Grand Quiddity Inspector General. Naturally. At the launch event, we'll have copies of an absolutely brand new paperback edition of Quiddity

Rodge Glass wrote two novels for Faber, Bring Me the Head of Ryan Giggs (Tindal Street Press 2012), won the Somerset Maugham Award in 2009 and co-authored the award-nominated graphic novel Dougie’s War: A Soldier’s Story (Freight, 2010). He is also Associate Editor at Cargo Publishing. As a special treat for event attendees, we hope to have preview copies of his not-yet-released short story collection LoveSexTravelMusik available on the night.

Chris Killen is an author whose much-vaunted novel The Bird Room showed "exuberant brio" (Guardian) and was "so fresh it practically pings with energy" (Independent). When he's not making podcasts about pizza and working on his new novel In Real Life, Chris is part of Metal Man, whose film Wizard's Way won the London Comedy Festival Discovery Award 2013.

Join Blackwell's, James, Sam, Rodge and Chris for a fantastic evening of fiction.

Date: Friday 15 March 2013
Time: 7.30pm
Venue: Blackwell's bookshop, The Precinct Centre, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9RN
Admission: free