Sioux Bradshaw has been providing the bookshop with our go-to stocking fillers for years, her little zines (including those in the Christmas series '364 uses for a Santa Suit' and 'How Santa Gets the Satsumas to Put into the Difficult Toe Area of the Stocking') are perfect £3 solutions for the desperate and tired shopper on the last legs of their trendy East London gift spree. They are snappy, funny and immediately likeable gems. But now Sioux has taken her one-woman production line to a new level with the Writer's Tool Kit. It contains everything the budding novelist requires to kickstart ..read more

We have recently restocked our collection of Coracle books, so I have been poring over them the past couple of days. I am growing especially fond of the work of Erica Van Horn. Reading books is often mistaken as a solitary activity, but the best books make deep connections with people, and in this way are greatly social things. I have come to realise that the books I am most moved by are the ones that are About People. With a capital A and a capital P. Many of Erica Van Horn's books are About People. My favourite one is a book called Small Houses, and it contains photographs of miniature hom ..read more

The artist Vincent Larkin has a restlessly questioning mind. His books blend text and illustration in ways that deliberately defy cliche or pastiche. He seamlessly embroiders fact with fiction, creating universes of semi-reality.  We are currently exhibiting several of his works for the next two weeks, and i suspect it will take me a lot longer than that to understand them. They need to be read and re-read, mulled over, looked at from every angle. That is not to say that they do not have an immediate impact - they clobber you from the outset with their dramatic scribbly drawings ..read more

Some days working in the bookshop can be dull. Some days it is drizzly outside and the door remains stubbornly shut as people walk past, hunched over, arms folded. But these days can be instantly transformed to joy, when someone comes through the door bearing new and wonderful artist's books. This happened recently when I was introduced to the books of Hamish Jackson. He wins an (unofficial no-cash prize) Bookartbookshop award for being the author of the first publication that we have felt compelled to attach a safety warning to. Why? because the book, entitled Gerard (see picture), partly ..read more

In our window display we are currently exhibiting the work of Stephen Wright. Stephen Wright is the owner and creator of The House of Dreams Museum located in Dulwich. A life project that has now been running for 15 years, in which he transforms his home into a dream-world filled with all things colourful, kitsch and garish. Eerie dolls, plastic toys and charity shop bric-a-brac are transformed into a vivid and eccentric universe hidden amongst the banal and unassuming streets of Outer South London. This bold display is softened by candid diary entries to Stephen's life painted on the w ..read more

The book holds an exquisite dark magic. Swirls of glinting blue smoke on a black cover invite you to delve inside, like the frisson one feels when walking into a cave's inky black entrance. Designed using a photocopier - a once cutting edge piece of technology, that now feels almost archaic - through a process of intervention, moving the page around as it scans, bizarre things begin to happen.  Inspired by Thomas De Quincy's Confession of an English Opium Eater, the book is like a visual translation of his writing. Time and space is bent and twisted, strange visions jump out of the pa ..read more

 'It is my go, says Peter. It is my go to hide.' 'You cannot hide from the truth, says Jane.' Have you ever read the children's learn-to-read series of books Peter and Jane? I have sometimes found the text of such books oddly unsettling. Of course, they are completely laudable, important tools to kickstart what will hopefully be a life-time of reading. But it is the unnatural, formal, and repetitive turns of phrase - that although are obviously engineered to help children read - make them, well, a little strange.  It is this strangeness that artist Otto has exploited to full eff ..read more

Sophie Herxheimer's Cardboard Paintings Our window display is currently bedecked in a glorious sunshine yellow in recognition of the long hot summer ahead of us. Artist and poet Sophie Herxheimer has installed a collection of black, white and yellow paintings constructed out of corrugated cardboard shapes. Some of them are vessels for her poems, whilst others speak just with images. They have a fairy tale quality, menacing and comforting in the same breath. Giant crows, wolves and witches loom alongside tea pots, flowers and loyal dogs.  The paintings cont ..read more

'I'm so busy busy busy busy busy busy busy doing so much pointless shite' This Zine imprint by Jackie Batey of Damp Flat books has been around since the beginning of the Credit Crunch. Issues are published twice a year and reflect the news of the moment and the anxieties of modern life. They appear at first glance to be simple doodles scanned in from a note book, but on closer inspection are much more nuanced.  Future Fantasteek follows in the comedic tradition of Monty Python or the Simpsons, in the way it appropriates the ubiquitous language of advertising, and in the process sends h ..read more

John Dilnot's bright and breezy illustrated Artists books celebrate English nature in all its glory. With the Worms, now in its second edition, is a colourful cabinet of creepy crawlies such as you might find in the Natural History Museum's hidden vaults - beetles, ants, millipedes, slugs and worms adorn its pages. Alongside these are more unexpected coins, bones, broken plates; the little relics of recent history that litter our gardens, forest paths or our fields. There is a modern 20p piece but also an old farthing, and a Victorian-looking key. Are these little treasures the real pursuit ..read more