Back in late 2023 I started writing something, and in early 2024 that something was a complete book, called The Bookshop Book.
In this post in late 2024 I was offering folk on my Patreon access to it.
The book centres on a bookshop called ... Books.
The name is explained not as a lack of imagination on the owner's part but by the fact that the proprietor's surname is Books, and Books's Books felt rather too much for him.
All good so far.
Today a Facebook advert alerted me to a new TV series called Bookish about to drop 2 days from now. Here's a still from the trailer:
Eagle-eyed readers will notice that the bookshop (around which this series is set) is called Book's.
Moreover, it turns out that it bears this name because the proprietor (the star of the show) is a Mr Book...
So - I now expect that when The Bookshop Book hits the shelves in 2026, if Bookish turns out to be a popular show, I will be accused of copying from it.
And the point of this blogpost is simply to flag the coincidence at work here.
Ironically, The Bookshop Book is tangentially related to The Library Trilogy, and in both works I talk about how the Library uses the currents of coincidence to bring interested parties together and manipulate the world. Coincidence?
