BOOK SA – News

Top Joburg book spot Boekehuis is turning ten in 2010. Here’s the manager Corina van der Spoel’s announcement:

Yes, we too cannot believe that we’ve been here for a decade already! From a small but ambitious start in 2000 in a little known corner of Auckland Park, Boekehuis has grown to a big-hearted home for book lovers, “popular and inviting, known far and wide” (according to Nikki Temkin’s new savvy Jozi Style Companion, Chic Jozi. Available from Boekehuis.)

Over the years your lives have become intertwined in many ways with the life of the bookshop. We hope that you’ll celebrate our 10th anniversary with us. We plan to do this in literary and festive style, and with many different projects:

• Of course there must be a big celebratory party (somewhere in March 2010);

• We also plan a special Boekehuis book to which we hope you will all contribute. Read more about this below;

• The year will start with the BIG January SALE. Watch your email for the dates;

• we also plan an exhibition and sale of antiquarian children’s books (mostly in Afrikaans);

• and we are thinking of and planning other projects. We invite you to make suggestions and propose collaborations in this regard.

Part of the celebrations will include the publication of a new book, The Boekehuis Book of Johannesburg, to which all fans of the shop and city are invited to contribute:

An invitation and request to contribute to: The Boekehuis Book of Johannesburg (Reading the city & reading in the city)

To celebrate our 10th anniversary and a passion for literature and your involvement in the community that Boekehuis has become, we ask you to write a piece or make an art work about Johannesburg and your relationship to it, i.e. what/where is your Joburg and what does it mean to you; how do you read the city and/or, what do you read in the city. (And of course you don’t have to live in Joburg to have a view on it and have a relationship with it! So write it!)

It could be an essay, a poem, or even a photograph or photo-essay or art work.

We’ll select the best works (assisted by a panel of selectors), and publish it in a book. Depending on what we get from you, we may put up an exhibition with art work to be sold.

We hope you are inspired by our book project to put pen and paint to paper! Most of all, we hope you’ll have fun doing so.

Your writing can be in English or Afrikaans and should be no longer than 3500-4000 words.

Your pieces should reach us by no later than 1 February 2010.

• Write to boekehuis@boekehuis.co.za with your submission/for more information

Congratulations on reaching the milestone, Corina and Co. – may 2010 prove to be Boekehuis’ best year yet!