This article appears as part of the Herald Arts newsletter.

Acclaimed horror movie director Guillermo del Toro has been doing a great job of promoting Edinburgh’s independent bookshops during his stay in the capital.

While on location to shoot his latest film for streaming monster Netflix, an adaptation of Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein, he visited The Golden Hare on St Stephen Street and posted a picture to X afterwards. His verdict? “A magical bookstore.”

Then last week he was in Tills Bookshop in Hope Park Crescent in Newington, one of the capital’s many second-hand bookshops and for 40 years now a low-key literary institution in the city. Again, more pictures and more effusive praise (“Lovely stuff – just lovely!”).

If you know Mr del Toro’s work you’ll know his tastes turn very much to the Gothic and the macabre, so of course he was also thrilled to visit St Cuthbert’s burial ground off Lothian Road and see the grave of the literary stoner’s literary stoner – Thomas De Quincey, author of Confessions Of An English Opium-Eater, On Murder Considered As One Of The Fine Arts and Suspiria De Profundis, the source for Dario Argento’s cult 1977 horror movie, Suspiria.

And so delighted was he by his first visit to the Surgeons’ Hall Museum that he went back for a second look, posting a selfie there for his 2.4 million followers. It shows him standing in front of something skeletal (I can be no more precise than that, though the monster in Alien comes to mind).


Among sundry other esoteric delights the museum has to offer him should he make a third visit are gruesome illustrations of brain operations in the early 19th century, the death mask of notorious serial killer William Burke, and a great deal of unsavoury looking items in jars. Some have labels which read like this: “Heart showing a lacerated wound at the apex of the left ventricle caused by a pistol ball which lodged in the body of the thoracis vertebra. The hollow in the portion of the vertebra attached indicates the size of the missile.”

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Should he hit Tills, The Golden Hare or any other of the capital’s independent bookshops – I can recommend Typewronger Books in Haddington Place or Lighthouse Bookshop on West Nicolson Street – he might look out for Findings, a collection of essays by poet Kathleen Jamie. One chapter is about Surgeons’ Hall, where she writes that she is “reminded of the visions of heaven that used to disturb me as a child”. If that’s heaven, I hesitate to imagine what Ms Jamie’s hell would look like. But there you go.

Sonically speaking

Glasgow’s Sonica Festival returns for its eighth ‘edition’ this week. The city’s well-regarded biennial festival of music, art and sonic experimentation seems to be expanding in size and stature and if internationalism is any measure of health, it’s doing OK on that front too. This year it hosts musicians and artists from Egypt, Myanmar, Ukraine, Australia, Luxembourg, Vietnam, Switzerland, Canada and  Netherlands. There’s also a muscular line-up of home-grown talent, from Golden Globe and Grammy Award-winning Glaswegian composer Craig Armstrong to Ayr-based Sanjeev Mann, aka Supermann On Da Beat.


Armstrong will take part in a live Q&A at the Glasgow Film Theatre on September 25 as part of a Cinemasters Season celebrating his work on films such as Romeo + Juliet, Moulin Rouge!, and The Great Gatsby. Mann, who is at the forefront of the much-needed push for more visibility and inclusivity for disabled artists, will perform at the Glad Cafe on September 28.

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It’s an absolutely packed programme. But among the highlights are the world premiere of Ela Orlean’s La Nuit Dorée (1960s French pop re-imagined by the Glasgow-based Pole); Scottish composer Michael Begg’s audio-visual piece Out of Whose Womb Comes The Ice (inspired by his time as musician in residence on an Antarctic patrol ship); an opening night performance by Alessandro Cortini of cult experimental rock band Nine Inch Nails; a takeover of Glasgow’s IMAX screen by local artist and musician Konx-om-Pax (Tom Sholefield); a collaboration between piper Harry Gorski-Brown and French electronica artist Annabelle Playe – and an afternoon of live music at the Burrell Collection featuring the Scottish Ensemble.

And finally

There was much excitement in theatre-land last week at the news Alan Cumming is to plonk his bahookie into the Pitlochry Festival Theatre hot seat by taking up the position of Artistic Director. A much needed fillip for Scotland’s dramatic arts? Let’s hope so. It is sorely needed.


Meanwhile Herald critic Neil Cooper took his own seat in another theatrical institution last week, Glasgow’s Tron Theatre, for a performance of Up, a two-hander from company Visible Fictions.

Elsewhere columnist Derek McArthur makes the artistic case for Yoko Ono – a case which grows stronger with every year that passes, in my humble opinion: go Yoko! – and to mark the passing of Simple Minds drummer Kenny Hyslop and inspirational actor and playwright Gary Robson, The Herald has published tributes to both men.