Founded | 2010 |
---|---|
Founder | Karen Stevens and Tom Stevens |
Country of origin | United Kingdom |
Headquarters location | Guildford, Surrey |
Distribution | Central Books Ltd |
Publication types | Children's Books |
Official website | www |
Hogs Back Books Ltd is a family independent children's book publisher based in Guildford, Surrey (UK). [1]
Hogs Back Books was founded in 2010 by Karen Stevens, a former medical journalist, and Tom Stevens, a former civil engineer. [2] The company name comes from its location on the Hog's Back, a ridge of chalk that lies between Guildford and Farnham in Surrey.
With its pig's snout logo and its motto “a nose for a good book...”, Hogs Back Books publishes books from newcomers, [3] and sells them through various retail outlets, including non-mainstream ones such as farm shops and art galleries (Tate Modern). They have also partnered with Loch Fyne, the fish restaurant chain. [4] In 2013, they teamed up with Inpress Books, a sales and marketing agency for independent publishers in the UK supported by Arts Council England and specialising in literary fiction and poetry.
Hogs Back Books publishes fiction books aimed to children up to 10. Amongst its most notable titles, Boris the Boastful Frog was recommended by The Telegraph in 2013 as one of the best books of the year for young children. [5]
For the release of the title O is for Olympics, part of its Alphabet series, the company joined the Olympic flame's journey and met with independent bookshops to gather comments on their experiences. [6]
Tanya Fenton, former animator for Disney, is one of its authors (Three Silly Chickens) and illustrators (Three Silly Chickens and Croc on the Rock).
The New York Times Best Seller list is widely considered the preeminent list of best-selling books in the United States. Since October 12, 1931, The New York Times Book Review has published the list weekly. In the 21st century, it has evolved into multiple lists, grouped by genre and format, including fiction and nonfiction, hardcover, paperback and electronic.
W & G Foyle Ltd. is a bookseller with a chain of seven stores in England. It is best known for its flagship store in Charing Cross Road, London. Foyles was once listed in the Guinness Book of Records as the world's largest bookshop in terms of shelf length, at 30 miles (48 km), and for number of titles on display. It was bought by Waterstones in 2018.
The Net Book Agreement (NBA) was a fixed book price agreement in the United Kingdom and Ireland between The Publishers Association and booksellers which set the prices at which books were to be sold to the public. The agreement was concerned solely with price maintenance. It operated in the UK from 1900 until the 1990s when it was abandoned by some large bookshop chains and was then ruled illegal. It also operated in Ireland until shortly before its final demise.
The Hog's Back is a hilly ridge, part of the North Downs in Surrey, England. It runs between Farnham in the west and Guildford in the east.
Waterstones, formerly Waterstone's, is a British book retailer that operates 311 shops, mainly in the United Kingdom and also other nearby countries. As of February 2014, it employs around 3,500 staff in the UK and Europe. An average-sized Waterstones shop sells a range of approximately 30,000 individual books, as well as stationery and other related products.
Blackwell UK, also known as Blackwell's and Blackwell Group, is a British academic book retailer and library supply service owned by Waterstones. It was founded in 1879 by Benjamin Henry Blackwell, after whom the chain is named, on Broad Street, Oxford. The brand now has a chain of 18 shops, and an accounts and library supply service. It employs around 1000 staff in its divisions.
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James Thin Ltd was a British bookshop chain, founded by James Thin in 1848. It operated for 154 years, during which time it was run by five generations of the Thin family. Starting from a single shop in Edinburgh, it grew to a national concern with 35 branches throughout Scotland and England. In 2002, following a period of rapid expansion, it went into voluntary administration, after which most of its shops were purchased by other companies in the book trade.
Bookselling is the commercial trading of books which is the retail and distribution end of the publishing process. People who engage in bookselling are called booksellers, bookdealers, bookpeople, bookmen, or bookwomen. The founding of libraries in c.300 BC stimulated the energies of the Athenian booksellers.
Constable & Robinson Ltd. is an imprint of Little, Brown which publishes fiction and non-fiction books and ebooks.
Borders (UK) Ltd., also known as Borders & Books etc., was established as a Borders Group subsidiary in 1998, and in 2007 became independent of the US parent company. At its peak after separation from the US parent, it traded from its 41 Borders and 28 BOOKS etc. shops with over one million square feet of retail space, taking around 8% of the retail bookselling market. In 2008 and 2009 the store numbers were reduced before the collapse of the chain. They also operated one single branch in Ireland, but closed this early in 2009. On 26 November 2009 it was announced that Borders (UK) had gone into administration. All stores closed on 24 December 2009.
Atlantic Books is an independent British publishing house, with its headquarters in Ormond House in Bloomsbury, in the London Borough of Camden. It is perhaps best known for publishing Aravind Adiga's debut novel The White Tiger, which received the 40th Man Booker Prize in 2008, and for its long-standing relationship with the late Christopher Hitchens.
Andrew Laties is an American writer and bookseller born in Baltimore, Maryland.
Mark Forsyth is a British writer of non-fiction who came to prominence with a series of books concerning the meaning and etymology of English words.
St. Mark's Bookshop was an independent book store, established in 1977 in New York City's East Village neighborhood. It was the oldest independent bookstore in Manhattan owned by its original owners. The shop, run by proprietors Bob Contant and Terry McCoy, specialized in cultural and critical theory, graphic design, poetry, small presses, and film studies—what the New York Times called "neighborhood-appropriate literature". It featured a curated selection of fiction, periodicals and journals, including foreign titles, and included unusual-for-bookstores sections on belles-lettres, anarchists, art criticism, women's studies, music, drama, and drugs.
The book trade in the United Kingdom has its roots as far back as the 14th century, however the emergence of internet booksellers such as Amazon partnered with the introduction of the e-Book has drastically altered the scope of the industry. Book retailers such as the Borders Group have failed to adjust to these changes, thus there has been a steep decline in the number of operating traditional and independent bookshops. However, still heavily influential on the trade globally, British publishers such as Penguin Books and Pearson remain dominant players within the industry and continue to publish titles globally.
John Purcell is an Australian author whose novels include The Secret Lives of Emma published by Penguin Random House in 2012 and The Girl on the Page, published by HarperCollins Australia in October 2018. He is also the Director of Books at Booktopia and Angus & Robertson Bookworld. He appears regularly in print, on television and at Australian writers' festivals to talk about books and the publishing industry.
The Second Shelf is an independent bookshop in Soho, London with a focus on rare or rediscovered women's literature. It was founded in 2018 as a feminist bookshop. It also operates as an online bookshop. The name "The Second Shelf" comes from the title of Meg Wolitzer's 2012 essay in The New York Times Book Review about sexism towards women's fiction. It is a reference to The Second Sex, a book by Simone de Beauvoir.