Livres and Bücher

Abingdon is a curious place in lots of ways - one day I'll get round to blogging about Abingdon in a bit more depth (the mysterious Abingdon blogger does a good job anyway). For those wanting to know more, we've amassed a goodly selection of books about the town and surrounding area in the shop. One thing about Abingdon that impacts heavily on us (in a good way!) is the large community of French and German language speakers who live here. There are many reasons for this: proximity to Oxford, location of UK headquarters of Miele, the European School down the road at Culham, and various internationally-renowned research centres dotted about nearby (notably at Culham and Harwell - in fact, having just checked now, Culham have the best location map of any website I've seen in a while - why does this look like something produced by Douglas Adams?). As well as a chance to try out my slightly rusty German occasionally, it does mean (for example) that we have quite a few books in translation (for our size), and books from publishers like the splendid Winged Chariot have done very well in the shop. But now we'd like to stock a small but significant range of French and German-language children's books - but I really don't know where to start on this. Someone once told me that ordering French-language books can be a bit of a challenge (most are not carried by the UK wholesalers), but at the moment it's knowing what the "must-haves" might be in any range we carried. "Le Petit Prince", "Le Livre Des Mots" by Richard Scarry and "Harry Potter A L'Ecole Des Sorciers" is about as far as I've got (I'm sad to say). We shall be discussing this with customers over the next few weeks...I'll let you know what the final line up is...