That’s us, according to today’s Guardian, where we are included in a great feature in G2 about independent bookshops .

We’ve just added an easy way for you to include a graphical link to us in your webpage. Click here to see the images and the html that you can simply copy & paste into your website. Thanks!

We’re used to struggling at this time of year, because sales fall off until the autumn, while we still have large amounts owed to publishers for the January/February textbook orders (the boost in trade thanks to student book sales in January pays for our Christmas stock).

However, this year we are finding it much more difficult than usual to scrape by. Sales at the start of the year have perhaps not been as good as usual, plus we suffered badly with the power cuts on Bold Street over the Christmas period. Various building repairs cropped up this winter, none major in themselves, but they all add up.

As the summer progresses, things will get easier to manage, simply because we are now ordering less, so by then we will owe publishers much less - but right now several publishers have put us ‘on stop’ so that we cannot order anything from them until we bring our payments up to date. Several more are likely to do so soon.

Can you help?

CREDIT LOANS - which get repaid in books (or other stock), so essentially you are paying in advance for future purchases

INTEREST FREE LOANS - long term or to be repaid later in the year, or as otherwise arranged

DONATIONS - big and small, all very gratefully received

BANK STANDING ORDERS - small regular donations, or could be credit loan as above. Download Standing Order Form (pdf format)

And not forgetting the simplest way to support us, to buy your books etc from us & to recommend us to friends, family and co-workers! Download our leaflet (pdf format)

News From Nowhere is a not-for-profit workers’ co-operative - the workers get near-miniumum wage according to hours worked, but no other remuneration from the business. Your support goes directly into keeping the bookshop going.

Thank you!

We’re selling tickets for the Cabaret & Cocktails Charity Comedy Night on Sunday 23rd April at Modo. The Gonzo Show stars Brendan Riley, and there will also be fabulous raffle prizes, free cocktails and canapes - and some surprise guest DJs from Liverpool’s most famous clubs.

Tickets £5 - all money raised goes to Sahir House - Merseyside’s HIV Support & Information Centre.

Today’s Daily Post carries a front page feature on the plight of locally owned shops in Liverpool . We’ve written in to the letters page about our own experience as a small business struggling to get by, having survived more than thirty years thanks to our many, many loyal customers. A lot of hard work, decades of bookselling experience and striving to do the best we can for our customers, all goes into making News From Nowhere what it is.

Liverpool Friends of the Earth have recently drafted a report on this very issue, ‘Make Liverpool Different’, surveying the current situation for independent shops in the city centre and recommending should be done to support them. They are planning to build this into a larger campaign. Without local shops, Liverpool will become a ‘Clone Town’ of big name chainstores, losing all its character and individuality. The ‘Capital of Culture’ title will ring rather hollow in that case. Copies of the report can be obtained from Liverpool Friends of the Earth, c/o 60 Duke Street, Liverpool L1 5AA; telephone 0151 707 4328 or email martindATfoe.co.uk (replace AT with @).

Nationally, there is a campaign for sustainable communities, ‘Local Works’, which is trying to put a Bill to parliament in support of small shops and businesses - their website is www.localworks.org

The best and most effective way to support local shops is to buy from them - simple. Yet it is so hard to shake off the mindset that leads us back again and again like sheep to the supermarkets and the chainstores - we’re all guilty of it, lulled by the sheer convenience, the seemingly cheap prices, the cosy reassurance of the cosy image and brand names made familiar by repetition in the ad breaks on television.

For a reality check about why supermarkets at least are so damaging to community and environment, read the articles from the Ecologist’s September 2004 issue: Supermarkets - the Naked Truth.

Can’t remember where I read this, but it makes the point very well: “supermarkets don’t close down local shops - people who shop at supermarkets close down local shops” .

We’re really pleased to announce that this Saturday, 4th March, Alexei Sayle will be at News From Nowhere signing copies of his new book The Weeping Women Hotel From 11am onwards - all welcome! (Signing will probably last for about an hour).

You may have noticed that fiction has been very underrepresented on our website. Although we always have lots of fiction on the shelves, it wasn’t a simple matter to organise booklists by subject in the same way as for other categories on the website. Plus there are hundreds of thousands of novels out there - many more than we can adequately include on this site!

But now we’ve added a Best New Fiction booklist to our Fiction category on the website, so that we have a simple way of featuring recommended new novels.

We’ve also added A-Z booklists for writers by surname but we can’t stress enough that these will always be very limited lists. To see all books available by a particular author, you are always best advised to search our other website instead, www.newsfromnowhere.co.uk, which has a comprehensive books-in-print database of the 1.5 million titles available in the UK, practically all of which we can order.

In our window display we are currently exhibiting 2 prints by the Liverpool-born Victorian artist James William Carling (1857-1887). Carling moved to America when he was 14, and later found acclaim as illustrator of Edgar Allen Poe’s classic The Raven - the Poe Museum in Richmond, Virginia, USA has a permanent exhibition of his illustrations.

It’s highly appropriate that Carling’s work should be displayed in Bold Street, because as a youngster Carling was a talented pavement artist and at that time Bold Street considered itself too posh for pavement art! Carling himself later wrote:

“…even the sight of the ragged coat was enough to bring the harsh move on – for in Bold Street, the promenade of the aristocracy, the pavement artist did not draw”

Thanks to Mike Kelly and Ron Formby of the Scottie Press for the loan of the pictures - and you’ ll find more information about Carling, and the efforts to bring him greater recognition in his native city on the Scottie Press website.

Christmas Day 25th Dec: - CLOSED
Boxing Day 26th Dec: - CLOSED
Bank Holiday Tuesday 27th Dec: - OPEN 11am-4.30pm

New Year’s Eve 31st Dec: - OPEN 10am – closing early at 4pm
New Years Day 1st Jan: - CLOSED
Bank Holiday Monday 2nd Jan: CLOSED

Schnews is a weekly alternative newssheet, available in print, by email or on the web, and we highly recommend it. They are looking for people who can print up a copies of each issue and distribute locally. Read on for their message: (more…)

Throughout October, Black history is celebrated - for events in Liverpool, see www.liverpoolblackhistory.co.uk

Events celebrating the links between Ireland and Liverpool, running till 30th October:

www.liverpoolirishfestival.com and full list of events

The new book by Banksy the innovative radical graffiti artist, Wall and Piece is due out on 3rd November.

It will incorporate the art featured in all 3 of his previous books (Banging Your Head Against a Brick Wall, Existencilism, and Cut It Out - all out of print now) plus new work.

Here’s the blurb:

Artistic genius, political activist, painter and decorator, mythic legend or notorious graffiti artist? The work of Bansky is unmistakable, except maybe when it’s squatting in the Tate or New York’s Metropolitan Museum. Bansky is responsible for decorating the streets, walls, bridges and zoos of towns and cites throughout the world. Witty and subversive, his stencils show monkeys with weapons of mass destruction, policeman with smiley faces, rats with drills and umbrellas. If you look hard enough you’ll find your own. His statements, incitements, ironies and epigrams are by turns intelligent and cheeky comments on everything from the monarchy and capitalism to the war in Iraq and farm animals. His identity remains unknown, but his work is prolific. And now for the first time, he’s putting together the best of his work - old and new in a fully illustrated colour volume.

It’ll be a hardback at £20. Pre-order Wall and Piece

On this weekend in Sefton Park: Africa Oye - Britain’s best free African music festival (News From Nowhere will be there selling CDs, books & more, see you there!) www.africaoye.com.

Also on at the moment, the Liverpool Arabic Arts Festival - it runs till 23rd June, and you can find out more on the Bluecoat Arts Centre website

On 31st May, here at News From Nowhere, Liverpool Social Forum presents guest speaker John Ross, author & journalist, who will talk about his long experience covering the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, Mexico.

When the twin towers went up in smoke I knew everything would be different.

I saw the shock and grief on my TV of ordinary New Yorkers and felt in my guts that America’s relationship with the rest of the world had turned a corner.

In the days that followed the atrocity I watched with admiration and hope as the bereaved took to the streets calling for an end to the bloodshed that had transformed their lives, insisting that the violence perpetrated against them and theirs not be used to justify atrocities against similarly powerless people in the Middle East. I was hopeful. (more…)

Long awaited new edition of the FREE Liverpool grassroots arts & culture magazine Nerve was delivered to the shop yesterday.

There’s a a launch party on Friday 8 April (8.00pm to late) upstairs at the Pilgrim Pub on Pilgrim Street to promote the new issue which will be available on the night.

7 days, 45 events, 30 writers, thousands of ideas, millions of words, and a Booker prize winner, it must be WOW 2005! Liverpool’s annual literary festival takes place from 23rd to 30th April. Booker Prize winner Barry Unsworth will be headlining the festival in Liverpool’s Year of the Sea, as will award winning Brian Jacques.

For full programme of events & to book online go to www.writingonthewall.org.uk.

On the book list pages and on the book detail pages, you can now click on the author name(s) to search for other titles by those authors. This will open a new window to the search results on our online order site.

This works well for most books and authors, but there are couple of things to watch out for:

• for books with multiple authors or editors, the search will look only for books with all those same authors
• also, the search is actually a general ‘key-word’ search rather than specifically a search of authors, so the search may throw up results which have titles containing the names searched for (which may or may not be useful!)

The first review is up in our new reviews section. It’s true, there is only one review as yet - but we’ll get some more up fairly soon, give us a chance!

Want to contribute a review of a book or CD that you’ve bought from us? Email it to us, making sure to include the title & author/musician details. Ideally it should be a review of something that we have stocked or would stock (e.g. for CDs, world/roots/political music). We’ll try and elaborate on that criteria at a later date.

The reviews page is actually a blog page like this one, so if you have an RSS reader, you can subscribe to the reviews blog via its RSS feed. (If you’re thinking, what is RSS? then here’s a good, jargon-free explantion).