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John Sandoe Books

@johnsandoebooks

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“A Smaug’s hoard of books”. Proudly independent since 1957. Quarterly catalogues, subscriptions, libraries, & world-wide mail order from our shop.

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Some good light at the shop by @johnsandoebooks

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4 months ago

Scenery 5 launched last night at Sandoe’s. A wonderful team and a joyful party full of swans and peacocks, dancers, designers, old and young. Simon Mørch is a magician, casting his spells of style and grace. As for the magazine - come and admire the attention to detail, the photography, the quality of the paper, the imagination, the beauty celebrated.

And gorgeous flowers by @jrasic_ in a vase of @mollyalexanderltd taken in John Sandoe (Books) Ltd by @johnsandoebooks

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5 months ago

Happy Christmas to all! And thank you to all who have made this such a cheerful Advent, both customers and staff.
#christmasnight #happydays #quietafterthestorm #feetupteethout #tangerinedream taken in John Sandoe (Books) Ltd by @johnsandoebooks

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10 months ago

A quick and very happy nip to Stockholm a couple of weeks ago to see two good friends, one conducting at the @berwaldhallen and the other one of that very particular cohort - a bookseller. After several years bookselling in Sweden and a brief period of work experience at Sandoe’s, Daniel Nordgren set up his own @nordbooks a couple of years ago, in Stockholm’s Södermalm district, creating a beautiful space devoted to books in English with a focus on independent and tiny presses. You’d be hard pressed to find an equivalent range anywhere in the UK. He’s extraordinarily well informed, quietly avant-garde and his selection is impeccably curated. A beautiful mind palace. We’re very pleased to see copies of ‘To Know and To Know Not’, an essay by Hisham Matar that we published in the summer, on his table. And last but not least a night walk in that beautiful city.

#independentbookstore #södermalm #greatbooksellersoftheworld @hishamjmatar #literaryheaven #independentpresses #treasurehouse #stockholm #mindpalace #avantgarde taken in Sankt Paulsgatan by @johnsandoebooks

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10 months ago

We are delighted to share with you our new catalogue: Books for Autumn & Christmas 2025. You can find it on our website or, if you prefer, the printed version is stacked next to our till.

This time of year always produces a rich crop but 2025’s autumnal list seems to be especially good. There are novels by Kiran Desai, Solvej Balle, Haruki Murakami and Olivia Laing; a biography of young Tennyson by Richard Holmes; Jenny Uglow on Gilbert White and Stephen Greenblatt on Christopher Marlowe; Jung Chang has written a second memoir to follow her ‘Wild Swans’, three decades later; there are literary musings from Ian Patterson, Zadie Smith and Robert Douglas-Fairhurst; a history of ‘Snö’ — in fact, there’s an entire section of winteriness, whether Nordic art or Arctic geo-politics; in case that wasn’t literally cool enough, we’ve a section of Chills and Thrills. In Art, there are books on Russian Icons, Vermeer, the Swedish painter Mamma Andersson and a handful of Marguerite Yourcenar’s essays. For those who like to indulge, there is a £130 monolith of chic on La Pausa - Gabrielle Chanel’s villa; a celebration of Franco Maria Ricci and his extraordinary 1980s’ art magazine FMR, and, from the makers of ‘The Irish Bakery’ a humbler, heartier indulgence: ‘The Irish Kitchen’. Les Fugitives have published a follow-up to ‘French Cooking for One’, this time pour deux, and Patti Smith has written another short memoir, ‘Bread of Angels’, which may or may not have anything to do with food. We could go on (and on) but we are now rather hungry…

Orders can be made through our website as well as by email, telephone or post. Link in bio.

#teatime #wheresthecake #takesthebiscuit #seriousdunking #ohlordidroppedmybiscuit #independentbookshop #newbooks #pattismith #montgomerypress #lapausa #mammaandersson #selborne #superfrogsavestokyo by @johnsandoebooks

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a year ago

The magic point between day and night, not yet dusk, hardly even twilight, but the lit windows suddenly brightening. And there’s Johnny, looking back. A pause to notice before diving back in…

We’ve had a busy week, for in addition to our usual business we launched Olivier Norek’s novel ‘The Winter Warriors, published by the great Christopher MacLehose and his new imprint, Open Borders Press. That was Monday; on Tuesday we had the immense honour of launching Lady Hale’s latest book - ‘With the Law On Our Side’, a primer for demystifying our judicial system - and Johnny had a splendid (and mercifully shortlived) misunderstanding with the Lady Chief Justice… We began selling books for the Chelsea Arts Festival on Thursday, hosted a magnificently discursive and enjoyable conversation between Chloe Dalton and Gareth Howell-Jones upstairs at Sandoe’s last night, with talk of hares, the natural world and our place in it; and tonight we are delighted to be holding the celebration of the books and authors shortlisted for the inaugural Ilse Schwepcke Prize. This is a new prize for travel writing by women, one for books written in English, the other for writers in German, and I have had privilege of being one of the judges. More anon.

Tomorrow? Who knows!

#upstairsatsandoes #raisinghare #staetconsideramiracula #jubilate #phew #ilseschwepckeprize #ilseschwepckepreis #eveninglight #litwindows #feveredbrow

@chloedaltonuk @sta.et.considera @chelseaartsfestival @hauspublishing by @johnsandoebooks

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a year ago

We are delighted to offer for sale a limited quantity of signed copies of ‘an Archive’ by Edmund de Waal, published in June 2025 by Ivory Press.

For his books ‘The Hare With Amber Eyes’ and ‘Letters To Camondo’, de Waal spent long periods in archives relating to his own family, but the ways in which we document our lives has preoccupied de Waal in broader ways. It is apparent in his work as a potter and was integral to his ‘Library of Exile’ installation at the British Museum (and now in Erbil). This new book is the closest work yet to a memoir: a form of ‘ragpicking’, as he puts it, before quoting David Jones, ‘I have made a heap of all that I could find’. De Waal’s idea of an archive is far more than something confined to a building – they are ‘places, streets and hillsides’ too. It consists of family stories associated with his return to Odessa, and subsequent trips to Tokyo, Paris, Berlin and other places. Further reflections on the contingency of memory, with a characteristically generous engagement with other writers on these themes. Beautifully published by the Ivory Press, this is a delicious, tactile book that will repay repeated revisits. With some illustrations.

Orders can be placed by email, telephone or via the link in our bio. by @johnsandoebooks

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a year ago

Closing off Series 2 of the podcast Gone To Timbuktu in conversation with Caroline Eden @edentravels — a beautiful writer who makes alluring sense of Central Asia in her travels through its kitchens. We talk about her new memoir, ‘Cold Kitchen’ – which opens in #Uzbekistan and concludes in #Ukraine — and her colour trilogy of recipe books packed with what Caroline calls ‘edible postcards’.

Listen in, for memories from a hundred delicious journeys in #Turkey, the #Baltics, the #Caucasus, #Russia … And for an elegy to Tajikistan’s Rohat Teahouse in the nation’s capital, #Dushanbe. This Soviet-era landmark was torn down just a few months ago to make space for shiny new constructions — the kind you see on repeat, here, there and everywhere in between. When @michaelturek and I visited in 2019, we spent hours in this room: sitting, watching, eating, talking (these are Michael’s pictures). For decades, Rohat functioned as one of the city’s most important meeting places for #Tajik artists. And now, it has gone.

Maybe it’s appropriate that Season 2 ends with an elegy to what has been lost. As Caroline so elegantly articulates, the art of travel — and the sensation of taste — is valuable because it can help to hold memories in place.

Thank you for all your loyalties, listens, shares. And to @johnsandoebooks @steppes_travel and @kodakprofessional for the podcast support.

#portra400 #travelwriting #foodwriting #geopolitics taken in Dushanbe, Tajikistan by @johnsandoebooks

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a year ago

Sir Alfred Brendel, a great and studious man, also an occasional and honoured customer. Here he’s reading (or feigning to read) Ionesco’s ‘The Chairs’, in a photograph taken by my colleague @marzenaphoto in his garden in Hampstead, some time in the late 1990s. A decade or so earlier I used to hear him play in Vienna, fingertips taped, under the expansive wing of a musical fairy godmother working in the Konzerthaus - not so much ‘You shall go to the ball’ as ‘You can come to EVERY concert and rehearsal and then to lunch/supper/walk in the Prater afterwards’. (I did.) Marzena’s photograph seems to catch an attentiveness and stillness that permeates all his playing. We walk by his collected and modest presence every time we go up and down the stairs at Sandoe’s. Bless him and all he has given us.

#alfredbrendel #thankgodforalfredbrendel by @johnsandoebooks

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a year ago

Good morning all! Today is our annual stocktake so we will be closed all day… Passersby will be greeted by a very different look to Sandoe’s today as shelves are emptied and windows undressed. But later, much later, everything will be tidy and in its place once again. According to the stock report done last thing yesterday evening, we have 30,001 books. We’ll find out anon how near the mark this is - a discrepancy there will always be but how large - or which way - is anyone’s guess till today’s numbers are in. And crunched. (Why are numbers always ‘crunched’? Sounds painful and undignified. And for some reason reminds me of the unexpected, arresting and funny opening of MFK Fisher’s ‘Consider the Oyster’: “An oyster leads an exciting but dreadful life.”) We are engaged in a sort of mad ‘guess how many beans are in the jar’ at this stage. All hands are on deck - this is the one day in the year we are all working together, barring particular circumstances: in this case, one of us is with a precious grandmother and another on his way to Hokkaido, to receive his laurels as a mochi-eating Olympian. And another of us - me - is laid low with a beastly bronchitis, dreaming of moss and bamboo forests, of spring coming. And very sorry not to be with dear colleagues this chilly February morning.

#stocktake #takestock #shopkeeping #independentbookseller #mochi #mimosa #moss #musing #30001 taken in John Sandoe (Books) Ltd by @johnsandoebooks

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2 years ago

It’s a great pleasure to let you know about a special edition of Hisham Matar’s latest novel, ‘My Friends’, published by our own imprint, the Cuckoo Press. The first edition was published by Penguin Random House in January and it is our best-selling novel of the year.

This Cuckoo Press edition has been designed by two of us down to the last detail: it consists of fifty numbered copies, quarter-bound in rose-coral cloth with Japanese stencil-dyed katazome paper boards and Japanese tissue paper tipped in to protect the signature page; paper labels to the spine and front cover; grey-green endpapers. Each comes in a matching slip-case lined with green paper. The reflowed text, set by Anthony Eyre in Garamond, is printed on Munken Pure 120gsm paper and bound by Ludlow Bookbinders Ltd. Each copy was signed by the (beaming) author on 27th November 2024. It costs £295.

‘My Friends’ won the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction 2024 and the Prix du Meilleur livre étranger 2024, was a finalist for the National Book Award 2024 and longlisted for this year’s Booker Prize.

Matar is one of the most consistently brilliant writers of recent years: thoughtful, eloquent, discursive yet concentrated. His first novel ‘In the Country of Men’ (2006) won the Gregor von Rezzori Prize, the Ondaatje Prize, the Guardian First Book Award, the Commonwealth Prize and many others; his outstanding memoir ‘The Return’ (2016) won a Pulitzer, the Rathbones Folio Prize, the Pen/Jean Stein Award, the Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize and has been shortlisted for numerous other honours.

It’s been a delight to work on this project and we are immensely grateful to our dear friend Hisham and to Penguin Random House for their permissions.

For orders, please get in touch by email, telephone or online (via Linktree above).

#hishammatar #georgeorwellprize #katazome #umbrellapine #cuckoopress taken in John Sandoe (Books) Ltd by @johnsandoebooks

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2 years ago

Every year we publish a small deliciousness - this year it’s a memoir of the West of Ireland by Tamasin Day-Lewis. Previous contributions have come from Tom Stoppard, Edmund de Waal, Cressida Connolly, Sofka Zinovieff and other amiable authors.

We give these to our customers when they buy books at/for/before Christmas, as a form of thanks for their coming to Sandoe’s- and because we love doing these. The first was in 1995… This is the 30th! by @johnsandoebooks

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2 years ago