We hope Charles Saumarez Smith, the chief executive of the Royal Academy of Arts, sees his book sales follow the trajectory of Pippa Middleton’s. While her book Celebrate has seen a rise in sales this week, booksellers have struggled to shift copies of The Company of Artists, the illustrated history of the Academy Smith brought out last month.
An art historian told me that he’d tried to sell his review copy to the Slightly Foxed bookshop on Gloucester Road this week but was soundly rebuffed. “We’ve already got 11 copies,” the bookseller told him. “We don’t want a dozen. We’re struggling to sell them.”
Slightly Foxed, which sells old and new books, stressed that at least five of the copies were ordered in from Bloomsbury — but that still means that almost half a dozen reviewers have been racing to offload their copies. “The new editions are sitting on the table,” one of the booksellers told me, “but they’re not selling as fast as we’d like them to.”
