Alasdair Hutton and the Castle Cat
We’ve been having such a busy time here in Wigtown, Scotland’s National Book Town! It was wonderful to have the festival back in the town and some of the changes made to keep everyone safe were actually things we hope the team will bring back in the future. Instead of the big marquee in the centre of the town the gardens were used as a meeting place, somewhere for workshops to be held and for events to be viewed on a giant screen. There was also a pop up coffee shop and bar, which worked really well despite the weather being somewhat challenging at times!
Although there were fewer tickets available we found the shop to be as busy if not busier than in a normal year and it was lovely to meet so many visitors to the town. Both of our books – The Castle Cat and Muscle work, Alcohol and Blame were successfully launched with events at the festival.
We’ve welcomed a new member to our small team – Magghi Maclean who is better known locally as the creative force behind Puffin Patchworks. Magghi has started coming in to help when Isabelle and Lou are busy with their other jobs! Magghi used to work in bookshops years ago so is great at display and keeping things in alphabetical order (she’s also a trained librarian!).
New team member Magghi Maclean
We’ve just had hallowe’en and we’ve never sold so many books for this annual event before. We had a window display and a special table inside the shop but we had to re order books several times. Lou did a fabulous window with a big flying witch and a bubbling cauldron full of pumpkins. The town held a very successful hallowe’en trail for the children where they could spot different window displays.
Artist Pauline Paterson has been back on the ‘Toon’ trail and has now created a new design for the very popular tourist destination of Portpatrick. Jayne and Pauline had a trip out recently to research which of the town’s buildings to include in the new image. We hope you like the result. We’re just in the process of getting the design made into prints, mugs, postcards, greetings cards and Christmas cards. We’ll be adding them to our website shop as soon as they become available.
Portpatrick Christmas Card image