A couple of quotes:
Closure notices on SPCK's Bookshop in Canterbury have been taken down after Outlook contacted the Texas-based Chairman of the owners, the St Stephen the Great Charitable Trust. However Canterbury Cathedral Shop is looking at ways to fill the gap should this be just a temporary reprieve.
In October 2007, against a background of disturbing allegations about the affairs of the ailing bookshop chain in the church and national press, both the Bishop and Simon Kington resigned from SSG citing 'conflicts of interest' and currently SPCK (with its lawyers) is "trying to work through the agreement with SSG". One of the issues could be the name. SPCK has insisted that SSG stop using their name for the bookshops, but few, if any, shop facias have changed! On its website SSG claimed in December to have "successfully re-energized their financial performance in order to make them self-supporting and hence, viable retail outlets for Christian bookselling".
The full newspaper can be downloaded here, but it is a large download (5.7mb) and was running quite slowly when I tried. In order to spare the diocesan servers I have put up a jpeg version of the front page containing the whole story here (jpeg, 345kb, will open in new window)
In related news
I have heard that the Sheffield SSG/SPCK shop reopened last week. Apologies for being behind with the news.
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