Throw away your ration books and get your vintage on as the West Port Book Festival hosts the Family Legends & WWII-themed tea dance today this Saturday, Old Saint Paul’s Episcopal Church. Proving to be one of the most popular events at the festival this year, our collaborations don’t stop with the Scottish Book Trust as we’ve all manner of local alliances at this wartime affair.
West Port Book Festivaleers are welcome to the launch of BOOKMARKS - original art works inspired by used books from Main Point. The launch is open to all and takes places this Thursday (13th), 5pm, at Main Point Books, 8 Lauriston Street.
We're delighted to have started posting Conan Doyle's Edinburgh, our exclusive literary audio guide with the inimitable Owen Dudley Edwards. He'll take you to some of Conan Doyle's Edinburgh haunts, letting you in on how these places influenced the creation of such literary characters as Sherlock Holmes, Doctor Watson, Professor Challenger and others.
Our website has served us well since we launched in 2008. The design by Will Brady still looks fresh today. But the landscape has changed since then. More and more people are browsing the web with their smartphones and tablet devices. Our website wasn’t conceived with small screens in mind, but we have to recognise that their number is growing. It’s time to adapt. Today, we’re proud to reveal our new responsive layout.
The theme of our programme launch party this year was 'love bookshops'. In a year when we've been hearing quite a lot in the press about bookshops closing, it seems only appropriate to celebrate the many brilliant bookshops which are still resolutely open. And in West Port we're very lucky to have so many.
We are proud to announce that the West Port Book Festival programme is now available as a mobile app. If you sport an iPhone or iPad, then click here to try it out. Save it to your homescreen, and you should find an icon featuring our ink splat.
After an entertaining launch party at Edinburgh Books, the programme is now live. This bookish jamboree comprises twenty-one events, two exhibitions, one three-day demonstration and at least one MP3 download.
This year I discovered an exciting new Fringe venue, the Summerhall, which won the Herald Angel Award for presenting a vast range of high-quality events (the These Silences Writing Festival conceived by Rupert Thomson, Artistic Director of the Summerhall, also won the Herald Angel Award). One of the most significant talks at the Summerhall was an interview with Zara Coombes and Irina Bogdanova, Director of Free Belarus Now and sister of imprisoned Presidential candidate Andrei Sannikov. Both the talk and a great performance of the Free Belarus Theatre in the Pleasance Courtyard were a real wake-up call to me.
If you go down to Princes Street Gardens today you'll be in for a big surprise... you've got until 26th September to catch a fun exhibition of sculptures that have popped up all around town. There are elephants, crocodiles, orangutans and something that may or may not be a tucan – and they'll all be sold at a grand charity auction that is expected to raise more than £1 million to protect endangered species overseas.
