Independent booksellers · Bakehouse Yard, Aldergate
Dog-Ear Books is a small shop with eleven hundred titles, one resident whippet, and strong opinions about all of them. Everything on our front shelf has been read, argued over, and shelved on purpose.
The shelf
Eight books we actually read, shelved the way we’d hand them to you. Pull a spine and it opens on the table below.
A mother and son replant a cider orchard on the Welsh borders while saying almost nothing to each other. Holt writes silence better than most writers write dialogue. I finished it at two in the morning and went straight back to the first page.
- Nell, who has hand-sold thirty-one copies
Part travelogue, part family history, following the old trade roads her grandmother’s stories came down. Ekwueme is funny in the way only serious people are. The chapter on the ferry at Mopti is worth the cover price on its own.
- Priya, this month’s book-club choice
A year spent looking at one hundred metres of Devon hedge. Sounds like nothing; contains everything. Feaver can make you care about a bank vole in a sentence and a half.
- Sam, who now owns binoculars
Vienna, 1913: a print shop, and a daughter who sets type faster than her father and is paid half as much. Marsh spent ten years as a compositor and it shows: you can smell the ink. The last thirty pages are devastating in the quietest possible way.
- Nell, read in one sitting
Poems about night shifts, nursing, and the last bus home. Lindqvist worked A&E for a decade and wastes no words on anything. Keep it by the kettle and read one a morning; you’ll be sorry when it’s finished.
- Priya, keeps a copy in her coat
Big, generous food for tables that don’t match. The jollof-stuffed squash has entered this household’s permanent rotation, and the headnotes read like letters from a friend who cooks better than you and doesn’t mind.
- Sam, splattered copy behind the till
Two forecasters at a fading coastal station fall in and out of love across thirty years of shipping bulletins. Sounds sentimental; is actually about work, weather, and everything two people manage not to say. Pryce’s sentences roll in like isobars.
- Nell, cried on the 73 bus
Twelve essays on the cities that raised her: Beirut, Marseille, and the bit of London the guidebooks skip. Haddad walks everywhere and notices everything. Read ‘Stairwells’ first, then start again properly from the beginning.
- Priya, underlined throughout, sorry
Staff picks
One each. We rotate them when someone finally caves and buys the last copy.
“The book I’ve pressed into the most hands this year. Nobody has brought it back.”
Nell · fiction & the till
On the wall · £9.99“One poem a morning with the kettle on. It has made me late for work four times.”
Priya · poetry & events
On the wall · £7.99“Cook the jollof-stuffed squash for people you want to keep. It works. Ask the club.”
Sam · cookery & the whippet
On the wall · £22.00The Dog-Ear Club
£4 on the door, which buys your glass of wine and keeps the lamps on. Read the book, or don’t quite finish it; both kinds of member are welcome, and the second kind asks better questions.
This month we’re reading Salt Roads by Ada Ekwueme. Copies are £8.99 with your club card, and Priya will save you one if you ask nicely.
Save me a seat
Dog-Ear Book Club
Date due · first Thursdays
Fines waived if you bring biscuits.
In the shop
Everything happens in the back room among the poetry. Seats are few; email to hold one.
30Jul
Reading and signing for The Orchard at Night. Expect long silences, deliberately.
06Aug
First Thursday as always. Ada Ekwueme joins us by phone from Lagos if the line holds.
08Aug
Half an hour on the rug in the front room. The whippet attends and is very patient.
21Aug
Five minutes each, no themes, no judging. Rosa Lindqvist closes the evening.
Visit
Follow the smell of bread into the yard; we’re the green door with the bell that sticks. Push harder.
[email protected]
020 7946 0958
We order anything in print, usually by Thursday. The whippet is called Comma and accepts no substitutes for cheese.