Ten years ago, Britain had reached its nadir when it came to independent bookshops. There were only 867 across the United Kingdom, which sounds like a decent enough number but when you consider that we were a country of 65 million back then, it’s not an especially impressive amount. However, it isn’t hard to see why many shops were shuttering. Ever since Amazon had begun to make its presence felt in the bricks-and-mortar bookselling trade, independent shops were simply unable to compete with that online behemoth on the one hand and the Waterstones group on the other. This left the indies stranded in the middle without, apparently, much hope for a renaissance.
Well, somewhat surprisingly this renaissance has now taken place. While pessimists might have expected that the numbers of bookshops would have fallen yet further after Covid, the economic effects of Brexit and the ever-resistible rise of screens, independent shops are now at their largest number since 2012.
The Booksellers Association has reported that there were 1086 shops registered in Britain last year, and, hopefully, even more to come this year. In my home city of Oxford, there has been a new antiquarian shop, Barker & Co, but more daringly, a romantasy-only bookshop, Bad Girl Books, has opened in Jericho, only a few doors along from the area’s now-inaccurately named The Last Bookshop.
We are told that TikTok, and its resulting spin off BookTok, is the reason why Gen Z are flocking to bookshops all over again, but I think that this is too easy a distinction. While it is undeniable that those who see books promoted on TikTok are often far more likely to buy them than via any other promotional channel – which, to the chagrin of those who write about books as part of their living, includes the review sections in newspapers and magazines – there is no particular link between a young woman or man seeing something featured on social media and deciding that they must go to the local independent shop rather than clicking on their Amazon app.
Instead, these smaller shops must find new ways to thrive and to beguile, and by the sound of it, at least some of them are doing this job extremely well. The very best independent shops – which include the peerless Topping group, which now has outposts in Bath, St Andrews, Ely and York – and such wonderful places as Mr B’s Emporium in Bath, Books on the Hill in St Albans, The Book Hive in Norwich and P & G Wells in Winchester all co-exist with their local Waterstones but manage to do something entirely different in the process.
There are far easier ways to make money, as any bookshop owner will readily acknowledge
Many of these shops are affiliated with local schools or literary festivals and see their roles not simply being to sell books passively but to recommend particular titles with fervent zeal to their loyal customers. And of course the sort of people who run independent bookshops care very deeply about what they are doing. There are far easier ways to make money, as any bookshop owner will readily acknowledge, which means that these things are undertaken firstly for the love of books, and secondly from a desire to evangelise about these books to a receptive and engaged clientele.
The market leader in this regard is surely the most upmarket bookshop in Britain, Heywood Hill in Mayfair, where Nancy Mitford once worked and which counts royalty, aristocrats and rock stars amongst its most valued clients. The shop is currently celebrating 90 years of its ‘a year in books’ subscription service, where, for prices ranging from £175 to £410, they will send you a bespoke selection of a dozen books a year, all designed with the recipient’s specific interests in mind and including extras including essays, bookplates and reading lists.
Yet this is, admittedly, at the higher (and more expensive) end of the scale. It is notable that ever since James Daunt took over Waterstones, he has deliberately geared the shops to be much more like a series of independents, where individual booksellers are given much freer rein to do what they like and where there is a faster turnover of stock because new titles are ordered, for the most part, one at a time and then restocked when they are sold out. This is something that Daunt learnt from running his own (reliably excellent) group of independent shops that bear his name, and which are still some of the finest places that you can hope to visit.
But bibliophiles all over the country should be reassured that there are options near them that will offer something altogether more personal and exciting than Amazon ever could. Perhaps it is not just the case that the death of reading has been much exaggerated – including by naysayers with books to sell on this very topic – but the death of the independent bookshop seems, thankfully, not to be at hand any time soon, either.
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