my mate who works in the royal mint told me about this astonishing feature on the new £50 notes and we've been avidly waiting for a king charles fifty to test it out - today we got one and can confirm that it does indeed work first of all, you need to make a "king cyclops". lay the note turing-side up, then fold it diagonally about 1/3 of the way down, so that the left eye on the translucent image of the king goes over the pupil of turing's right eye. it will look like the king has one really big eye

this is a lovely idea from the Booker Prize committee. It's to help the general public while away the long hours between the shortlist and the prize announcement - it works like this: chair of judges Edmund de Waal has personally released 14 ducks around the UK (3 in London, 2 in the SE, 2 in the Midlands, 3 in the NW, 1 in the NE, 2 in Scotland and 2 in Northern Ireland) - each with an aluminium leg band

i wanted to see whether all the london streets named after UK cities are horrible, or whether it was just Oxford Street. here are my findings Aberdeen Road in Highbury. very ritzy. pleasant the way it fades off into mist in google street view. a solid 8/10

any booksellers reading this who are tempted to invest - i would strongly advise against it. we've had a light-based quantum computer for a while now and ok it's very fast but it's absolutely useless for bookselling the main problem is that it doesn't support batchline or gardlink, or as far as i can tell any alternative stock management software. it simply uses boson sampling to calculate the distribution of photons

We're now half way through the current season of LRB Screen at Home in partnership with @mubi! If you haven't joined us yet, there's still four great events to come 👇 lrb.me/screen On 11 Nov, @harikunzru will discuss the lure of the extreme and the shadows of history in relation to Orson Welles's 1946 noir thriller THE STRANGER lrb.me/screen

had an astonishing conversation with a food photographer who's worked on a load of big recipe books - don't want to say which but you'd have heard of them - who told me something fascinating about prawns prawns are slightly bioluminescent, which means they're impossible to photograph properly. but they're needed all the time, in photographs of paella etc.

so rage against the machine just announced their european tour dates and we were shocked to discover that apparently they are playing at the bookshop on august 14th. first we've heard of it. having an emergency staff meeting now about how we can make this work presumably they won't need chairs which makes the set-up a bit easier. plan at the moment is to strip the new fiction tables and put the books in the lift. as long as the 'mosh pit' is kept relatively confined to the centre of the shop i think we should be ok

oh god oh god pierce brosnan is in the shop. I repeat pierce brosnan is in the shop didn't recognise him for a moment (he has a white beard) but it is definitely him

many apologies - i know a lot of you are waiting for an update on the bee situation. twitter app kept crashing on phone! anyway here's what happened

https://twitter.com/LRBbookshop/status/1106919280921247744

about twenty past 6 yesterday just before we closed we had a gruff-voiced phone call. "i think you have something of mine. i'll be round for it shortly." i was happy to wait, so sat downstairs in the poetry section watching the febrile insects clamber over one another in the jar

nice old buffer came in to see if we wanted to buy some antique geological maps. told him that we didn't buy secondhand, but he insisted on showing us anyway & spread his maps out over the counter. they were very handsome, mostly mid-Victorian & beautifully inked as i thumbed through them politely something caught my eye: the words "bury pl. wc1". i reached for my magnifying glass and studied the map more closely (point marked with arrow). "that's us", i said, handing the magnifying glass to the customer.