Publishing News, 10th May 2002, David Blow's diary

Akeme Expression is Andrew Malcolm's bookshop. Unusually for a bookseller, he has written and published all the stock himself. Is there another bookshop in the world where the author can claim to have written all the stock? The joke when Tim Waterstone started writing novels was that having established a chain of bookshops he was now going to set about filling them with is own books. Well, Andrew Malcolm has done just that. He is a one-man supply chain. Is he the only person to have read Making Names and The Remedy? I would not be at all surprised. I wonder how he deals with returns.

Like other unusual bookshops, and like all great retail brands, Akeme Expression is a monument to a monumental obsession. Andrew Malcolm is evidently a man with a mission. His mission is to sell his books. But to open your own bookshop in order to sell your own books is, I suggest, quite an eccentric thing to do. But this is the book trade, and the book trade has always welcomed, even celebrated eccentricity. Akeme Expression is, I understand, on a short lease.

AKME EXPRESSION, MAY-JUNE 2002 THE LEGAL BACKGROUND and Malcolm's Lectureship offer THE BROAD STREET SHOP featuring the Gallery of Shame, Akme University, St. Frideswide's grotto, Akme Ball etc. Reports: LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS Oxford Times 21/6 THES 26/4, Oxford Times 26/4, Guardian 30/4, Oxford Star 2/5, Oxford Student 2/5, Cherwell 3/5, Publishing News 10/5, Private Eye 17/5, Guardian 25/6, South China Morning Post 11/5, Change (US H.E. journal), Philosophers' Magazine, Autumn. Alan Ryan quits, ranting: THES 31/5, Cherwell 7/6, other quotes Rave review of Making Names in Oxford Student 30/5: "One of the most powerful statements of the human condition written in the past century."