It’s been a super busy week of doing new things over at The Little Bookstall. A week of new books, great reads, school book fairs and more, much more!

If you’re already following us*, you’ll know that we are committed to stocking books for all readers. For all readers, regardless of their reading ability. (*and if not, why on earth not?!) So I was delighted to take delivery of a batch of books from Barrington Stoke publisher.

Barrington Stoke publish the most amazing selection of books for children. Amazing because they are commissioned, written and designed to be super-readable and accessible. Because of this, they can help all children become readers for pleasure. Essentially, Barrington Stoke are the publishing version of my spirit animal. They’re my new Publishing Book Crush!

…new books for all readers

We’re quite new on the block. And The Little Bookstall is still very much a work in progress. We already stock a somewhat lovely selection of books, both fiction and non-fiction, for confident readers and avid readers. And now we’re thrilled to be able to open up more books to children who haven’t yet found their reading legs!

I’ll be writing more about Barrington Stoke soon, but just wanted to give you a couple of highlights. A lot of their books have an interest age level that is several years higher than the reading age. For example, The Dog that Saved the World (Cup) by Phil Earle has a reading age of 8, but an interest age of 8 to 12. This means that, if your child is 11 or 12, but has a reading age of around 8, the content should interest them and it’s within their current reading ability. Clever, eh?

…and it doesn’t stop there!

The font has been specially designed to be dyslexia-friendly, and the layout and spacing are designed to minimise overcrowding and visual distractions. It’s all super, super clever and there are not words to tell you how excited I am about these books!

I’ll be reviewing these books here and on Instagram over the next few weeks. But, if you can’t wait for that, and must must must share the joy of these book with your child, drop me a message.

What else is new at The Little Bookstall?

As I said earlier, we’re quite new and just finding our feet. We decided to take our books out into the wild in the run-up to Christmas! Yep, we packed up boxes and boxes and boxes of our very favourite books and took them to Christmas Market evenings at some local schools.

My creaky old bones are aching from all that humping and dumping of all those books today. But we had a blast last night. And I was delighted to meet parents of our readers in real life, and to help advise them on book choices for Christmas.

…we loved it so much that…

We’ve decided that we’d love to do more! So, if you’re near Tooting, Balham and Clapham and would like to have The Little Bookstall to take part in a PTA fundraiser, please get in touch. And, if you’re not near us, but think we could work together, drop us a line. After the last 18 months, we all know that keeping apart won’t stop us! So, let’s (virtually) put our heads together and see if we can help get more kids reading more!

Happy reading!

Martina