(I wonder if people in the queue were getting distracted and going into Galloway and Porter. I know I would.)

Why queue to withdraw your money when you could just go and spend it all on books? :-)

Ah, good point. You might only be able to withdraw so much from cash machines, but if you can put n-ty bricks of gold on your card... :)

OK, so Northern Rock has the Bank of England as a lender of last resort when customers suddenly withdraw all their money, but who's Galloway and Porter's supplier of last resort when customers suddenly buy all the books? The British Library?

I suspect they may be able to get more books fairly easily. So long as people paid for them.

In the normal sense, yes.

But 250 million books at 24 hours' notice could still be a tall order.

Aha, just remembered that I meant to come back to this. No, they weren't, because the queue went down the street from the NR building, rather than up, and hence didn't go past G&P at all. Clearly a tactical error on the part of the people who started the queue :-)