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World Book Day 2025 – Distribution Centres and Fruit Judging!

World Book Day 2025 – Distribution Centres and Fruit Judging!

How was your World Book Day? Mine was fun, but not quite what I expected!

This year I was invited to join HarperCollins, the owners of Barrington Stoke (who publish my book REEK), as they opened their new distribution centre in Robroyston. And as I'm a geeky lad who loves the thought of touring enormous warehouses, I said yes, of course!

The new centre is VAST, able to send out 3 million books per week at peak. It's split into two main areas – palettes of books for bulk distribution, and then a hi-tech area that manages individual books in hopped moved around automatically by over two hundred shuttles.

An enormous warehouse containing stacks of shelves.
It's hard to get your head around the size of the place…

It's hard to get your head around the scale of the place. There are around a hundred stacks of shelves, and each stack is 150m long and twelve palettes high. Fork lift trucks use guiding wires to navigate safely between them, stretching up in a way that looks quite terrifying.

An enormous black cube of storage containers.
The individual storage area, for smaller shipments.

Much of the distribution these days is in smaller amounts, so a separate area manages these. “This is the expensive bit” says Gordon, the Supply Chain Managing Director. Inside that black cube are two hundred automated shuttles fetching and storing over a hundred thousand hoppers of loose books. When boxes come in, the operator unpacks them, scans them, puts them into a hopper … and away they go. When they need to be shipped, the shuttles fetch the hoppers for packers to put them into their delivery boxes.

I had a go myself! I was GREAT. Except I put my books in the wrong box and the automated weighing system scolded me.

Alastair Chisholm, wearing a pink hi-vis vest, in front of the packing system.
This is me smiling before I got it all wrong. I can get better.

I had a brilliant day. I was the geeky kid at the front of the tour asking the guide questions non-stop. Thank you so much to Barrington Stoke and HarperCollins for inviting me along!

A collection of authors in pink hi-vis vests posing for their photo-op.
Photo Op! From left to right: Adele Parks, Jeffrey Archer, Kimberley Chambers, Rob Biddulph, Nigel Slater, Sarah Ferguson, Peter Irvine, Alastair Chisholm, Jamila Gavin.

And then the next day there was some rather more normal World Book Day activies at the lovely Stockbridge Primary School, chatting Space Pirate Bears with the younger pupils and all things sci-fi (including I Am Wolf and REEK) with the older ones. And the greatest honour of all – judging the "Fruit and Veg Carved Into Literary Characters" competition. Happy World Book Day, everyone!

Alastair Chisholm standing before a table of fruit and veg carved and drawn to look like literary characters.
Our team of expert judges studies the competition entries