The bookkeeper's spring list, 2026

The cabinet's request ledger has, this spring, been thicker than usual. I count six dozen letters in March alone — most of them after Eleanor wrote about the Curiosities Corner in Time Out Bath. Of those letters, a fair number asked the same question: what have you got that nobody else has?

I am tempted to send everyone the same list, but Eleanor would not approve. Instead, here it is in writing — five entries that came through the bench in the last six weeks and that I have not seen at any other British retailer.

1. The Cathkin Braes Letters · Bramble Workshop (Glasgow)

A six-hour walking-sim, played as a Glasgow Corporation surveyor in 1968 measuring the public-park boundaries for the council. There is no story in the conventional sense — only the boundaries, the council's brief, the surveyor's notebook, and the slow accumulation of a sense of place. Bramble Workshop are two people, both ex-Royal Surveyors, both eccentric. The cabinet has the only physical edition I am aware of outside their Bandcamp page.

2. The Llandudno Ballroom · Hwyl Press (Conwy)

A short-form parser game (yes, parser) about running a North Welsh seaside ballroom in 1953. You type, the ballroom answers, you spend an evening managing a swing band, a missing trumpeter and a chair you cannot afford to replace. Hwyl Press do absolutely no marketing. Eleanor met the developer at an Aberystwyth fair and bought our three copies on the spot.

3. The Three-Daughter Inheritance · Quill Studios (Belfast)

A choice-based narrative game in the visual-novel mould, set in a Belfast solicitor's office during a fortnight in 1991. The mechanics are slight. The writing is not. Quill Studios are a four-person co-operative and the cabinet picked up their second print run via a small distribution arrangement Bertram has been quietly nurturing.

4. Buttermere Crossings · Three Tarns (Keswick)

A turn-based puzzle game about leading a small flock of Herdwick sheep across the Lake District passes. It sounds twee. It is, in fact, the most rigorous puzzle game the cabinet has stocked all year — each of the seventy-two passes has exactly one correct sequence of bell-rings, and the developer has held me personally responsible for ten lost weekends. Eleanor solved it on a single Saturday and has refused to share her notes.

5. The Pinfold Index · Bramble Workshop (Glasgow, again)

The second Bramble entry — yes, I have a soft spot for them. The Pinfold Index is an unfinished game that the studio publishes in monthly installments via direct download. The cabinet's copy is a printed-binder edition with hand-numbered pages and a USB stick. We have four of those. They are not coming back.

All five are on the games aisle this morning. The two Bramble titles are signed by the developer on the inside cover, which I had not previously promised but which Eleanor managed to extract at the Frome fair in April. If you take one, take both — the postage works out the same.