Sally has a list of ten items she needs to buy. Open the flaps to see inside the shops, where unusual things are going on. Should those wild animals be upstairs in the pet shop? Will the plates fall off the wall in Mr. Cooper's China Shop? Can Sally find everything on her list? Children will pore over this charmingly illustrated interactive book to find out.Each shop is depicted in Alice Melvin's trademark highly detailed illustrations that both evoke a previous age and yet remain strongly contemporary. Rhyming text and repetition of Sally's shopping list make this book perfect for reading aloud. Praise for The High Street "A satisfyingly unique ending. The inventive format and crisp retro details will put this at the top of every curious little girl's reading list." -School Library Journal

This book tells the story of a Chinese family owned shophouse in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, through the lens of petite capitalism. Neo-Marxist in spirit, literary in tone, it recounts the triumph and despair of a family in its struggles against the financial frailty and structural limitations of a pervasive economic form of the Chinese diaspora: the small family business. The daily realities of the Chinese shophouse are captured by the art of ethnography and the author’s own memories. The book examines Chinese petite capitalism afresh by bringing into focus issues not usually covered by writers on the subject—the concept of petite capitalism, the architecture of the Asian shophouse, the Hakka kinship, ‘tiger parenting’ and Chinese childrearing, the culture of debt, family legacy, and Chinese inheritance. The book reveals the business acumen for which the Chinese diaspora are renowned as part truth and part myth. Schumpeter’s ‘creative destruction’ haunts the small Chinese family business where hard work and individual efforts are helpless against the ever-evolving nature of capitalism.

When Carlene Lovelle discovers her husband has been keeping a secret, the women of Texas rally behind her in a battle-of-the-sexes romantic comedy from New York Times bestselling author Carolyn Brown. Carlene Lovelle, owner of Bless My Bloomers lingerie shop in Cadillac, Texas, has everything she's ever wanted: a loving husband, a successful small town business on Main Street that sells custom lingerie for making women feel beautiful, and great friends who never disappoint. However, that all changes when Carlene finds a pair of sexy red panties in her husband's briefcase. She knows exactly who those panties belong to—they were purchased from her very own shop! She's beginning to think her life would've been easier if she'd just opened Main Street Books and stayed away from silky underthings. Now her marriage is over and her life is in a tailspin. She's humiliated, upset, and heartbroken, but it's time to move on to the anger stage of grieving. There's no point looking backward when looking forward reminds Carlene that all she needs are the ladies of this small town to rally around and teach her that revenge is a dish best served red-hot. (Previously published as The Red-Hot Chili Cook-Off and A Heap of Texas Trouble.)

Just outside downtown Newark, New Jersey, sits an abbey and school. For more than 150 years Benedictine monks have lived, worked, and prayed on High Street, a once-grand thoroughfare that became Newark’s Skid Row and a focal point of the 1967 riots. St. Benedict’s today has become a model of a successful inner-city school, with 95 percent of its graduates—mainly African American and Latino boys—going on to college. Miracle on High Street is the story of how the monks of St. Benedict’s transformed their venerable yet outdated school to become a thriving part of the community that helped save a faltering city. In the 1960s, after a trinity of woes—massive deindustrialization, high-speed suburbanization, and racial violence—caused an exodus from Newark, St. Benedict’s struggled to remain open. Enrollment in general dwindled, and fewer students enrolled from the surrounding community. The monks watched the violence of the 1967 riots from the school’s rooftop along High Street. In the riot’s aftermath more families fled what some called “the worst city in America.” The school closed in 1972, in what seemed to be just another funeral for an urban Catholic school. A few monks, inspired by the Benedictine virtues of stability and adaptability, reopened St. Benedict’s only one year later with a bare-bones staff . Their new mission was to bring to young African American and Latino males the same opportunities that German and Irish immigrants had had 150 years before. More than thirty years later, St. Benedict’s is one of the most unusual schools in the country. Its remarkable success shows that American education can bridge the achievement gap between white and black, as well as that between rich and poor. The story of St. Benedict’s is about an institution’s rise and fall, resurrection and renaissance. It also provides valuable insights into American religious, immigration, educational, and metropolitan history. By staying true to their historical values amid a continually changing city, the downtown monks, in resurrecting its prep school, helped save an American city. Some have even called it the miracle on High Street.

Reprint with new afterword. Originally publshed: London: Country Life Ltd., 1938.

What will become of the shops? More than ever, the high street appears to be under mortal threat, its shops boarded up as the sad 'bricks and mortar' survivals of a pre-online retail world. But behind the bleak appearance, there is more to see. Back to the Shops offers a set of short and surprising chapters, each one a window into a different shop type or mode of selling. Old shopping streets are seen from new angles; fast fashion shows up in eighteenth-century edits. Here are pedlars and pop-ups, mail order catalogues and mobile greengrocers' shops. Here too are food markets open till late on a Saturday night, and tiny subscription libraries tucked away at the back of the sweet shop. Over time, shops have occupied radically different places in cultural arguments and in our everyday lives. They are essential sources of daily provisions, but they are also the visible evidence of consuming excess. They are local community hubs and they are dreamlands of distraction. Shops are inherently spaces of imagination as well as of practicality. They belong with their own surrounding streets and town; they bring back the times and places of our lives. They linger in stories of all kinds, whether far-fetched or round the corner. From butcher to baker and from markets to motor vans--after reading this book, you will want to go back to the shops.

The new novel by Natalie Babbitt, author of Tuck Everlasting Joe Casimir needed help with the choice he had to make. But how do you choose the person who will help you choose? Mr. Boulderwall, the millionaire, knew exactly what he wanted Joe to choose. And millionaires are experts at making choices. Well, aren't they? But Vinnie, the number-two man down at Sope Electric, didn't much approve of millionaires. He said to Joe, "Listen, kid, all of 'em act like they're the only ones with a ticket to the show!" But he didn't have any real advice to offer. Joe's Gran didn't either, as it turned out, and neither did Aunt Myra.The good advice was there, though. Right across the street. Just waiting right across the street. There are a lot of good things just waiting. You'll see.

In six hugely entertaining hours of television, BBC One brings the story of the great British high street to life in a major new series for Autumn 2010. At the centre of the programmes are five modern-day shopkeepers and their families, whose challenge will be to run their shops exactly as they would have been run in six key eras of British history, from the 1870s to the 1970s. The book that accompanies the television series tells the remarkable story of how the rise and fall of the high street transformed all our daily lives, touching on the history of technology, family relationships, work, food, fashion and community that make Britain what it is today. Each chapter vividly retells the story of the evolving high street at that period in time, with special emphasis given to changes in food, fashion, attitudes, jobs and family life. Illuminated with human interest stories from the programmes and illustrated with hundreds of archive photographs, this is the truly fascinating story of British society over the last century as well as a lavish photographic record of the great British high street in its heyday. CHAPTER 1 THE BIRTH OF THE GREAT BRITISH HIGH STREET. CHAPTER 2 SETTING UP SHOP (1880-1901). CHAPTER 3 THE GOLDEN AGE OF SHOPPING (1901-1918). CHAPTER 4 PEACE AND PROSPERITY (1918-1939). CHAPTER 5 MAKE DO AND MEND (1939-1945). CHAPTER 6 HELP YOURSELF (1945-1969). CHAPTER 7 COMMON MARKET (1970-1980). CHAPTER 8 THE FUTURE OF THE HIGH STREET. CHAPTER 9 YOUR HIGH STREET'S STORY.

Tis the season to fall in love in four quaint small towns.

Bookstore owner Arlo and her Friday Night Book Club sleuths are going to have to read between the lines to solve this mystery! It's movie time in Sugar Springs and the whole town is pitching together to get the historical Coliseum Theater ready for the event of the year—the premiere of Missing Girl, local author Wally Harrison's bestselling novel turned film. Thrilled to bring tourists to Sugar Springs, the town comes together to host the late author's event. But when a stranger arrives, boasting he has definitive proof that Wally didn't write Missing Girl...well, drama leaps from the page into real life. Mishaps start taking place around the theater—and then the stranger is discovered dead in his hotel room right before his press conference. Can Arlo and her Friday night book club to sleuth out the killer and solve the mystery before the town's Hollywood dreams go up in smoke?