I'm going to take a chance and risk offending all sorts of book retailers by writing about the prize-winning booksellers, The Book People. The company was founded by Ted Smart and Seni Glaister in 1988. I remember the first time I met them when I was at Reed International Books and we had to decide whether to offer them credit terms. We did and I fixed a lunch for Ted and Paul Hamlyn. They got on like a house on fire. At that time a number of major publishers resisted supplying the Book People - concerns about credit-worthiness, impact on book club and trade sales etc. Ted and Seni proved their detractors wrong by consistently generating more sales into channels which had been underdeveloped. Their importance to the book trade (and to many readers who have been introduced to books buying habit) is illustrated by the dinners they host on every evening at Weideman's restaurant during the Frankfurt Book Fair. The guests are everyone with whom they deal on a day-to-day basis (specials sales managers etc) and the high and mighty of the industry who pay homage to Ted and Seni. I can't help thinking back to traditional publishers' attitudes to them in 1988 and I'm sure Ted and Seni do too.

I've managed to upset a very senior civil servant, John Dolan who works at the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council by criticising how the UK public library system is run. In a letter to the Bookseller he accuses me of distorting statistics. I'm not going to reply but this link has generated a lot of interesting debate. It seems to me that the underlying problem of library funding is that we're arguing about statistics and paying consultants to support a point of view rather than getting down to work to sort out what is rapidly becoming a national disgrace.