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bentleysteed.bsky.social
Bentley Steed
@bentleysteed.bsky.social
28 followers 27 following 100 posts
Andrew makes bespoke furniture from sustainable local hardwoods in Fife, Scotland. Writes and paints. Enjoys history, very original fiction and Bruichladdich. Recovering bookseller.
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bentleysteed.bsky.social
I've been at a bookseller meeting just like that.

I've also been the bookseller that made a Christmasaurus in his own time to promote a children's book for the shop window display:
Photo of me holding up a handmade fabric model of author Tom Fletcher's Christmasaurus. The character's head is about three feet tall, with blue fabric layered over upholstery wadding and wire mesh. The eyes are handpainted over plain white Christmas tree baubles.
November 25, 2025 at 11:28 AM
bentleysteed.bsky.social
"...to see ourselves as others see us..."

In a bookshop in Grenoble, France:

#Scotland
#France
#booksky
Photograph shows two shelves in the European travel section of a bookshop in Grenobles, France. A quarter shelf for the entire UK/ GB, one half shelf for London, a city of nearly 20 million, and the same again for Scotland, a nation of 5 million people.
November 10, 2025 at 1:58 PM
bentleysteed.bsky.social
Well done Haynes Manuals and a big boo to @fordmotorsofficial.bsky.social

The lock on the door of my van simply came out of the door thanks to a previous owner's shonky repair. Official Ford dealerships in Scotland were quoting a minimum 2 week wait for repair (if at all possible). 1/2

#RIPOFFUK
Image shows the cover of my copy of the Haynes manual to the Ford Diesel Transit Custom Owner's Manual
October 15, 2025 at 4:44 PM
bentleysteed.bsky.social
The very first batch of Cruffins based the recipe by Lune Bakery but substituting rye sourdough starter for live yeast and filling with my homemade whitecurrant curd...

Four days of patience, and they'll be gone in hours.

#freshbaked
#bakesky
#sourdough
Image shows six cruffins (croissant-muffins) on a cooling rack with jar of whitecurrant curd open front-right next to a piping bag.
September 10, 2025 at 11:57 AM
bentleysteed.bsky.social
Look what I found while packing the contents of my writing desk for the move to France...

...old newspapers celebrating a US President who didn't have a brain worm preventing the formation of logical, compassionate thought, and a coherent, grammatically-correct sentence.

#USA
#Obama
#TheGuardian
Image is a photograph of an old edition of The Guardian newspaper, dated Thursday 6th November 2008, with the headline: 'Obama's new America'. The leader article was writtem by Gary Younge. Behind The Guadian, the edition of The Economist journal from that same week bearing the headline: 'The quiet American'.
August 30, 2025 at 12:56 PM
bentleysteed.bsky.social
Very weird to be packing my books for the move to France, knowing that it could be at least six months before I unpack these beauties by @adapalmer.bsky.social, @jeffvandermeer.bsky.social, and many others.

However, I am looking forward to making my own etageres des livres

#booksky
#scifi
#france
Image shows an old IKEA Billy bookcase containing what's left of my favourite science-fiction shelves part-way through packing. Titles shown include: Christopher Brown's 'Tropic of Kansas', Becky Chambers' 'The Long Way To A Small Angry Planet', Harry Josephine Giles' 'Deep Wheel Orcadia', M John Harrison's 'The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again', Martin MacInnes' ' Gathering Evidence', and James Tiptree Jr.'s 'Warm Worlds and Otherwise'. Not shown are all my Ursula Le Guin novels, sadly already boxed...
August 29, 2025 at 11:29 AM
bentleysteed.bsky.social
#bakesky
Olive, cheese and rosemary tear-and-share loaf with homemade rhubarb vinegar and olive oil dip...

A great way to enjoy patio eating on such a beautiful day on the Fife coast.

#fifelife
Photo shows a savoury loaf baked in a ring cake tin, flavoured with olives, rosemary, cheese and garlic. In the front, a shallow bowl containg a dip made from homemade rhubarb vinegar and olive oil.
July 8, 2025 at 1:01 PM
bentleysteed.bsky.social
Beach at Ely, Fife, this morning.
photo shpws eroded waves of sandstone, shaped by wind and sea into oil-like forms
June 28, 2025 at 9:38 AM
bentleysteed.bsky.social
Thursday's reminder that after five decades of diligent practice, I can make great furniture from planks of tree, paint stunning equine portraits and write enjoyable fiction.

I can even bake stunning cakes.

What I still cannot do is make an edible rye sourdough. I won't be eating this #humblepie.
Image shows a failed attempt at producing a rye sourdough loaf, the crusty top lying upside down (at left), beside the soggy mess still in the tin.
June 5, 2025 at 9:38 AM
bentleysteed.bsky.social
When you discover a jar of Plum Conserve with Rum made by your mum nearly 14 years ago, hiding at the back of the cupboard, and it not only answers the question: "What should I spread on my buttery?" but that it's also delicious.
#dementia
#dementiacanttakeeverything
#homemade
#homemadejameisthebest
Photo shows an open jar of plum jam with rum, made by mum from a glut of plums in autumn 2010 and which she gifted to my wife and I when my woved into our first home together, the following year. In front of the jar is a buttery, also known as a 'rowie', a breakfast pastry local to Aberdeen, Scotland, that resembles a roadkill croissant. The buttery has been spread with the jam and I've taken a bite of both.
April 7, 2025 at 9:02 AM
bentleysteed.bsky.social
"Shrinkled."

Not only a new word which needs no definition to be understood but also very concisely my wife's question on the beach this morning: "I wonder what a jellyfish looks like when dried..."
Photograph shows a jellyfish, approximately twenty centimetres in diameter, lying among the shingle of Pettycur Beach, Kinghorn, Fife. The shingle comprises the very small remains of shells crushed by decades of tidal action.
March 16, 2025 at 10:57 AM
bentleysteed.bsky.social
#20bookchallenge Choose 20 books that have remained with you; one book per day, in no particular order, and with no explanations or reviews, just the jacket. Here's 20 of 20 (and controversially, it's a graphic novel):
#booksky
#books
The cover for Katsuhiro Otomo's graphic novel, Domu: The Dreams of Children, shows a young girl looking up at a giant floating cube which is an abstracted form of the tower block apartment where she lives. Written and illustrated by Otomo, the creator of the Akira srories which brought the Japanese manga art-form to global prominence, Domu is a departure from the futuristic science-fiction dystopia with which the author is more usually associated to the urban terror of a serial killer in a social housing project who meets his match in a little girl with wisdom beyond her years.
February 22, 2025 at 10:18 PM
bentleysteed.bsky.social
#20bookchallenge Choose 20 books that have remained with you; one book per day, in no particular order, and with no explanations or reviews, just the jacket. Here's 19 of 20:
#booksky
#books
This is a proof copy of Lynn Coady's novel, Saints of Big Harbour, which may be out-of-print in the UK now. I was given this by a publisher rep when still working as a biyer for a small chain of indie bookstores. It shows a young boy ice-skating alone on a frozen lake, a well-chosen photo as it captures the loneliness of the broken relationship between father and son at the heart of her stunning book. Great writing like this is rare.
February 21, 2025 at 9:48 PM
bentleysteed.bsky.social
#20bookchallenge Choose 20 books that have remained with you; one book per day, in no particular order, and with no explanations or reviews, just the jacket. Here's 18 of 20:
#booksky
#books
The paperback jacket for Becky Chambers' debut novel, The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, shows a woman stood on a distant hilltop, gazing up at a galaxy full of stars.
February 19, 2025 at 8:33 PM
bentleysteed.bsky.social
#20bookchallenge Choose 20 books that have remained with you; one book per day, in no particular order, and with no explanations or reviews, just the jacket. Here's 17 of 20:
#booksky
#books
The UK jacket for Joseph Olshan's novel, Night Swimmer, shows a man in his twenties underwater, having just dived into an outdoor pool, the ripples behind him.
February 18, 2025 at 10:00 PM
bentleysteed.bsky.social
#20bookchallenge Choose 20 books that have remained with you; one book per day, in no particular order, and with no explanations or reviews, just the jacket. Here's 16 of 20:
#booksky
#books
The black-and-white photo which forms the main image of the abstract jacket for Jorge Luis Borges', Labyrinths, is a collection pf wooden blocks arranged as a maze. It perfectly encapsulates the Argentinian author's style of writing short-stories in essay format and conversely, writing non-fiction in the style of short stories.
February 16, 2025 at 7:00 PM
bentleysteed.bsky.social
#20bookchallenge Choose 20 books that have remained with you; one book per day, in no particular order, and with no explanations or reviews, just the jacket. Here's 15 of 20:
#booksky
#books
The paperback jacket for Christopher Brown's dystopian fiction, Tropic of Kansas, is overlaid on a partly-obscured flag of the United States. What was a very bleak vision of a future America caught somewhere between the Gilead of Margaret Atwood's, The Handmaid's Tale and Cormac McCarthy's, The Road, has been somewhat overtaken by MAGA-numpties voting for an adjucated rapist and his face-eating leopards.
February 15, 2025 at 10:56 PM
bentleysteed.bsky.social
#20bookchallenge Choose 20 books that have remained with you; one book per day, in no particular order, and with no explanations or reviews, just the jacket. Here's 14 of 20:
#booksky
#books
Presented as a Polaroid-style image of a teenage boy, sat on a wooden pier, staring out to sea with a flock of gulls in the background, the hardback jacket for Peter Benson's coming-of-age novel, Riptide, perfectly captures the mood of the novel. I first saw it in the city library at Aberdeen while a student, looking for a novel which surprised me in a way that a lot of literary novel simply didn't as they all hurried to disappear up their own University of East Anglia graduate of Creative Writing program fundament. You know that style of writing as soon as you smell it because the ordure of tortured adjectives is as painful as keen nails dragged down a blackboard but hey, that gubbins wins Booker Prizes...
February 14, 2025 at 8:59 PM
bentleysteed.bsky.social
#20bookchallenge Choose 20 books that have remained with you; one book per day, in no particular order, and with no explanations or reviews, just the jacket. Here's 13 of 20:
#booksky
#books
The original UK paperback jacket of Susanna Moote's detective fiction, In The Cut, has silver text for the title and author name, over a red-toned background which partially obscures a woman holding a thick hemp rope. Don't watch the film: thankfully, I never did but friends who did reported it was worse than reviewed. The novel, however, stands out for the distinct style in which it's written but beware the ending: it's bleak.
February 13, 2025 at 7:13 PM
bentleysteed.bsky.social
#20bookchallenge Choose 20 books that have remained with you; one book per day, in no particular order, and with no explanations or reviews, just the jacket. Here's 12 of 20:
#booksky
#books
The jacket for Joan Brady's autobiography, Prologue, in which she writes about her previous life as a ballet dancer, shows a female ballet dancer depicyed from the rear in a pale blue chalk render. We see only the dancer's left shoulder and upper arm against a dark, perhaps foreboding background.
February 12, 2025 at 7:31 PM
bentleysteed.bsky.social
#booksky
#20bookchallenge would have you choose 20 books that have remained with you; one book per day, in no particular order, and with no explanations or reviews, just the jacket. Here's 11 of 20:
The.book jacket for Ada Palmer's novel, Too Like The Lightning, shows what looks like a small shuttle craft flying toward a community at the foot of a steep mountain peak not unlike Devil's Peak featured in Spielberg's film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
February 10, 2025 at 5:38 PM
bentleysteed.bsky.social
Choose 20 books that have remained with you; one book per day, in no particular order, and with no explanations or reviews, just the jacket. Here's book 10 of 20:
The original UK mass-market Harvill Press paperback edition of Haruki Mruakami's, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, whoch shows the colourised negative image of a young man with eyes closed, face lifted to the sky. His lips are coloured a vivid red; the jacket is electric blue and so hints at the strange inversion throughout the novel: references to the spiritual and mystical appear as everyday occurences, while the everyday is invoked with the fantastical. Western readers may miss the symbolism of a well or a doorway, so it's worth looking-up references to these craft-made objects.
February 9, 2025 at 7:33 PM
bentleysteed.bsky.social
Book 9/20 for #booksky #20bookchallenge challenging us to choose (just) 20 books that have stayed with us, in no particular order, no reviews, just the cover.
Photo shows the punk-inspired book jacket for Michelle Tea's apocalytic, end-of-the-world-meets-actor-Matt-Dillon novel, Black Wave, that is about far more than sub-cultures of the Nineties and working in a San Fransisco bookshop.The jacket design is an eclectic white-on-black illustration showing a Dodge van, fireworks, crystals, a cockroach, boots decorated with hand-painted stars, bottles.of artisan beer and of course,.Matt Dillon.
February 8, 2025 at 9:26 PM
bentleysteed.bsky.social
Inspired by the repeat of Jimmy and Briony's trip to a Stockholm bakery in www.channel4.com/programmes/f... @channel4tv.bsky.social First attempt at Swedish-style Orange & Cardamom buns using some of the marmalade Rose cooked-up yesterday.
Photo shows icing sugar dusted orange and cardamom buns. The recipe for the bread base is adapted from p.154, Chelsea Bun recipe in the River Cottage Hanbook No.3 'Bread'.
February 8, 2025 at 2:08 PM
bentleysteed.bsky.social
Book 8/20 for #booksky #20bookchallenge challenging us to choose (just) 20 books that have stayed with us, in no particular order, no reviews, just the cover, and here I am throwing down a black velvet gauntlet for arguably the greatest vampire novel ever published...
The UK edition of Poppy Z Brite's novel, Lost Souls, which features the author's name in a vivid red to match the lipstick of the woman in the retouched black-and-white portrait photograph. Referencing everything Goth from the bleak beats of Bauhaus to the back-combed hair of gloomed youths yearning to be more like The Cure, the sweet tang of clove cigarettes, Southern Gothic road movie murder-mystery on doomed loops in the back of a blacked-out Ford Transit, this reimagining of vampires leaves the idea of interviews in the dust of a bayou.
February 7, 2025 at 8:48 PM