A few weeks ago, three colossal boxes of new books from Penguin arrived in the bookshop. I made myself a strong cup of tea and then began the lengthy task of unpacking them, taking out the books and piling them up in neat stacks, ready to tick them off the invoice before zapping them on to our computer system and putting them out on the shop floor.
Rather unusually, one stack of books was visibly shrinking, even as I added to it. Strictly Bipolar is a smartly designed, pocket-sized paperback, in which psychoanalyst Darian Leader challenges the rise of ‘bipolarity’ as a solution to complex problems. There were ten copies of this book in the delivery, but it seemed that any customer who found his or her way to the back of the little bookshop couldn’t help but take one. By the time I’d finished unpacking the boxes, there were only four copies left.
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