History

We founded Old Grindles Bookshop in Edinburgh in 1987. After many adventures the shop was moved, continuously trading, to Kings Bookshop Callander in 2000-3.
The bookstall in Kings Stables Road was our first pitch.

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We moved to Callander to live in the country, to live above the shop, to have a large and interesting garden space behind the shop, and to have room for a proper book bindery alongside the shop. We continue to publish poetry books, having done a dozen in the first paperback series, some subsidised, a further dozen in hardback leather spined style, for which subsidy was suddenly withdrawn (so we carried on), two further paperbacks, seven in the 43-page chapbook series, and we are working on the first two of a new metallic series. We continue to publish the broadsheet Poetry Scotland, which is currently at issue 65. We have developed the garden and peopled it with bees, cats.. and often, poets. We host the Callander Poetry Weekend every year, and the bindery has produced many beautiful books that may be purchased in the shop. We bind only for the shop and we cannot undertake outside binding work.

We have traded continuously in Edinburgh then Callander since 1987, and there is not a lot about the book world we have not come across in our decades as booksellers, writers, readers, editors, publishers, and variously librarians and bookbinders.

page in progress

authors associated with Old Grindles Bookshop:

Angus Calder (Waiting in Waikato, diehard) see also Chapman 110 (2009) for a series of articles on Why Angus Matters, including Sally on Angus as "Writer-in-Residence at Grindles Bookshop" Morelle Smith poet and novelist, (Deepwater Terminal and The Ravens and the Lemon Tree, both diehard, and several other books including some published in Albania.) John Cargill Thompson author of 14 books of diehard plays, and Gael Turnbull who used Grindles as a storeroom for his poetry busking stand. And there were others...

 

  Angus Calder            Morelle Smith                 John Cargill Thompson, Gael Turnbull,    page in progress