The UP Week blog tour focuses today on why university presses #TeamUP. In our post we look at why collaboration with bookshops is so important.
For university presses, bricks-and-mortar bookstores remain vital to their mission, identity, and success. As physical spaces, they serve not only as points of sale but also as crucial cultural, intellectual, and community hubs that amplify the distinctive contributions of scholarly publishing.
Booksellers are often champions of university press titles, hand-selling them to customers and featuring them in staff picks or themed displays. These human endorsements, grounded in genuine enthusiasm and expertise, are invaluable in helping university presses reach readers beyond the academic library.
Supporting bookshops, then, is not merely a matter of distribution strategy—it is a reaffirmation of the values that underpin university presses.
The MNG sales and marketing team collaborate closely with booksellers to navigate the challenge to get books stocked in physical stores and to facilitate orders for instore events. And, while we’re thankful for all of them, we’d like to highlight The Gilded Acorn as bookshop that regularly goes above and beyond to #TeamUP to support our university presses.
The MNG sales and marketing team collaborate closely with booksellers to navigate the challenge to get books stocked in physical stores and to facilitate orders for instore and off-site events. And, while we’re grateful to the long list bookshops we work with, whether they be independent or chains, we’d like to highlight The Gilded Acorn as an example of a bookshop which has continually gone above and beyond to #TeamUP to support our university presses in 2025.
We asked The Gilded Acorn to tell us a little bit about themselves, and working with university presses:
Can you tell us a little bit about The Gilded Acorn?
The Gilded Acorn was rebranded in 2023 from Alpha books which had existed in some form on the site at 1 Portsmouth Street, London since 1994. The name derives from an Elizabethan printing press/ bookshop in the surrounding area which was called The Gilded Acorn (we were reviewing Elizabethan maps of the area when we bought the shop and found the name listed!).
We’ve mentioned how vital bookshops are for university presses, but what about the role UPs play for bookshops?
As a bookshop on the campus of the LSE, we stock a number of UP titles for our academically- minded clientele. The breadth and variety of subject areas and titles that university presses publish allows to make sure the non-fiction titles we stock are always interesting and up to date.
What do you enjoy about working with university presses?
Being able to facilitate book sales at author events – particularly events held at universities or similar where there’s a ready-made audience for a lecture, panel, roundtable or launch which would be difficult to replicate in store. We often see continued sales instore following these events, demonstrating the longer-term value of the collaboration between university presses and bricks and mortar bookshops.
Also, brilliant sales reps who go a long way to ensure a smooth process for all stakeholders!
How many university press author events have The Gilded Acorn been involved with this year?
Too many to remember! Over 50?
Thinking specifically about the university presses that the Mare Nostrum Group represent, have there been any stand out authors, titles or events?
The Party’s Interests Come First: The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping, by Joseph Torigian (Stanford University Press). Joseph is a wonderful author, very professional and such an interesting and thorough book.