April 4, 2022, 11:39am
According to this breathlessly unhinged story in Woman & Home, Adele bought some books in February. STOP THE PRESSES. But ok, yes, we here at Lit Hub are sadly prone to unseemly excitement when any non-literary celebrity shows the slightest interest in books, but this is some real cloak-and-dagger shit:
A “mole” has told the Daily Mail that the Grammy-award-winner dropped into the Chelsea branch of Daunt Books with a friend, “wearing sunglasses and looking like a superstar.” The English singer reportedly bought £1,000 worth of books during a trip to a traditional bookstore in London, after telling its starstruck employees, “I want a library.” It remains unknown exactly when Adele’s visit took place, but it’s likely to have occurred during her recent stop in the UK for the BRIT Awards in February.
Here’s the thing, though. While £1,000 is a lot to drop on books, it isn’t exactly at the level of stocking a library. Using some rough averages, assuming a mix of hardcover and paperback, we can call the price-per-book £10; at 1.25 inches per spine (a generous average) for 100 books, that works out to around 10 feet. So, that’s two shelves on a large bookcase, hardly the stuff of libraries.
This is probably a long-shot, but Adele, if you’re reading this, I would happily help stock your library with a wide range of really great books, culled from the shelves of the finest indie bookstores in the English-speaking world. I come cheap.