Prince Harry’s highly anticipated memoir Spare has finally hit bookshelves, but some bookstores are poking fun at the book’s scathing opinion of the royal family.
The Duke of Sussex can now add author to his résumé, after Spare was released on Tuesday 10 January following nearly a week of leaked excerpts and headline-grabbing details taking aim at the royal family.
In London, some stores opened at midnight to meet the demand for the controversial memoir, while others have extended their hours. Harry’s autobiography has already hit the No 1 spot on many bestseller lists, as others call it one of the “biggest pre-order titles for a decade”.
Now, one UK-based bookshop has created a cheeky window display for Prince Harry’s Spare. Bert’s Books in Swindon went viral on Twitter on Tuesday when they tweeted an image of the display.
In the picture, four copies of Spare are displayed alongside three copies of How To Kill Your Family by Bella Mackie. “Anyway, we do have some spare copies of Spare if you want one,” they captioned the tweet, which has almost 8,000 likes.
The move received thousands of praise from Twitter users in the comments section, with one user writing, “Oh this is clever”.
“A+ book display,” said someone else.
Another user wrote: “I see what you did there.”
In an interview with Newsweek, a staff member at Bert’s Books said the window display was “certainly intentional” but meant to be “lighthearted”.
“It wasn’t an accident. The How to Kill Your Family book was in our window anyway because it was our best selling book of 2022,” they said. “When we were putting Spare out this morning we thought, ‘Oh, let’s put them together, it will be funny.’ We sold a couple but we weren’t expecting to sell a huge amount anyway because we’re an independent bookshop and we cannot afford to do the discounts everybody else is doing.”
Ahead of Spare’s release, a number of online retailers and major bookstores began offering the memoir at half-price after large parts of the book were leaked to the press. Spare’s RRP is $36 (£28), but four days before its official release, the memoir was on sale for half price through pre-order in store and online.
On Amazon, Spare holds the number one spot on the best seller’s list, despite being on sale for $22.42 on Amazon US and £14.00 on Amazon UK, respectively.
A report from The Guardian estimates that Spare will be among the “biggest pre-order titles of the last decade” for a number of bookstores. John Cotterill, Waterstones’ non-fiction category manager, told the publication that “high customer interest” will be “sustained on and after publication, with everything pointing to Spare being one of 2023’s bestsellers.”
Among the shocking extracts from Spare include an alleged fight between brothers Prince Harry and Prince William, Harry’s illegal drug usage, his sordid relationship with stepmother Camilla, and the last words he said to Queen Elizabeth II on her deathbed.
Read Lucy Pavia’s four-star review of Spare by Prince Harry.
