Close to where his granddaughters gave a series of interviews, billboards advertised Mandela commemorative coins, souvenir shops offered Nelson Mandela Day mugs and wristbands, bookshops displayed Long Walk to Freedom and other Mandela titles in their windows and tourists posed for photos beside a giant statue in, perhaps inevitably, Nelson Mandela Square.
The point is that big sales are heavily dependant on off-the-cuff, unplanned purchases, on people choosing the book out of any number they might buy from the bookshop display before Christmas.
If any book dominated best-seller lists and bookshop displays, it was Helen Macdonald's 2014 Costa Book of the Year and Samuel Johnson Prize-winning memoir H Is for Hawk (2014).
Out today are autobiographies from David Jason, Jennifer Saunders and John Bishop, Patsy Kensit, Danny Baker and Ronnie O'Sullivan, June Brown and Brendan O'Carroll – all set to jostle for space in festive bookshop displays with new cookery titles from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Lorraine Pascale and Gok Wan.
One day we could cruise a Fifth Avenue department store, just like Lauren Bacall in a career-gal movie, and later spend hours in an Eighth Street bookshop, displaying a genuine interest in the poetry of Allen Ginsberg.
Cobham Bookshop 12a Anyards Road, Cobham, Surrey KT11 2JZ, 01932 862903 Established more than 30 years ago, the Cobham Bookshop displays a strong array of fiction and history on its shelves, as well as lots of children's books, with a dedicated area for teen fiction.
Images on advertising hoardings have been blacked out, and a bookshop displays pamphlets and tomes on religious rulings, including how to treat slaves.
The disguising of the titles is driven by the nervousness of commerce – few bookshops would display a cover that featured the F-word in full – and particularly of the advertising industry.
Sophia McDougall raised this point last year when she wrote in the New Statesman about how she started counting the number of male and female authors promoted by bookshops on display tables.
But be warned: modern romance, if bookshop window displays are anything to go by, includes Irvine Welsh's Porno as well as Carol Ann Duffy's Rapture.
