EMMA HAMLETT
AHEAD OF THIS HALLOWEEN I MET UP WITH Emma, SHOP OWNER AND MANAGER OF DURHAM’S NEWEST INDIE BOOKSHOP, COLLECTED; WHERE WE DISCUSSED THEIR LATEST BESTSELLERS, RECENT AUTHOR EVENT HIGHLIGHTS, AND HOW THEY GOT INTO THE MAD WORLD OF BOOKSELLING.
You can still get a great thriller, you can still get a romance, or lit fiction or serious history, serious politics. You can get all of that and still have everything written by women. I love it when people don’t notice. I love it when people do. |
James: Does your bookshop have any specific interests or something that makes it stand out from any others?
Emma: I suppose the main one is that we specialise in books written by women. I think that’s probably the most interesting thing about us. Partly because one of the things I wanted to try to show with that is that you can still represent a full range of fiction, non-fiction, and kids; you can still get a great thriller, you can still get a romance, or lit fiction or serious history, serious politics. You can get all of that and still have everything written by women. I love it when people don’t notice. I love it when people do. I think that’s a real point of difference for us. Another thing is that in fiction we carry quite a lot of translated titles. That’s something I’m really interested in. From the very early days of having the business I partnered with a literary translator to do a lot of programming and that has really impacted on our stock. I don’t know what the actual figures are but I feel like an unusually high proportion of what we have in fiction is translated.
And then probably the third thing is our event programme and the kind of community that has been built around the shop. It’s a slightly mad programme, if I’m being honest. I was just checking November yesterday and I think we have 7 events and that’s on the run-up to Christmas. Which feels a bit crazy. But you know, we’re a little over a year in and we’re still at the point of saying yes to everything and trying to seize all the opportunities that are there. We had a really lovely moment when we hosted a couple of things at the Durham Book Festival a couple of weeks ago, and one of our regular event attendees went up to one of the New Writing North staff and said, “Your festival is great, but it's a book festival every week in Emma’s shop”. And I just thought that was wonderful. |
J: Give us an idea of the size of your bookshop. How many books do you currently have in stock?
E: Oh, I’m not sure. Too many probably. If I were to guess I’d say somewhere around 10,000. But that really is a guess.
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J: I suppose you’re likely to have a few more now than before
E: Yeah, October. Who knew? That was news to me it has that many new tiles
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J: It seems as though it used to be Super Thursday, and now it seems to be the whole month.
E: I have to say I was disappointed with Super Thursday and then I realised that… so, this is one very good reason why it’s still important to have shops that specialise in work written by women. Super Thursday is not so much a thing for us. Because all of those big titles it turns out were written by men. The following Thursday was our Super Thursday because all of the big titles by women came out the week after.
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J: Another quick indication of size then, how big is your team? How many staff do you have?
E: Well, we’ve got 4 of us at the moment. Two of us work the equivalent of full-time and two part-timers as well. The shop is open for 70 hours a week so even a full-time post only covers about 50% of our opening hours.
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J: For those unaware of Durham, are there any other booksellers on your doorstep, and what’s it been like working with them since you opened?
E: It’s quite an interesting picture in Durham. We’re the only independent bookshop. A full shop of new books. But there is a stall in the market hall called BookWyrm. They started at a very similar time to us actually, and they specialise in LBTQ+ literature and that’s lovely, very complementary. That feels like a really nice relationship as we’re not competing, we sell different stock and we can signpost each other to new customers. There are things we can do that are obviously difficult for them due to the constraints on space in the market. We did try to do a joint event earlier in the year which didn’t come off unfortunately but we’d like to try again. It’s harder for them to do events because they don't have the space. So yeah, they’re really brilliant.
Then there’s a radical politics bookshop which I think does mainly secondhand, but they do have some new titles, they’re the People’s Bookshop. There’s an excellent Oxfam Bookshop, which is very good. And then obviously, there are two branches of Waterstones. |
J: You’ve mentioned events already, but could you tell us about one or two of your most recent events?
E: Probably one of the most nerve-wracking but very exciting things we've done recently was when we hosted Emma Donoghue in early October. We needed a bigger boat for that one. There’s a Methodist church which we hired as a venue. We had an audience of over 100. It felt like quite a big deal to do that. I was very grateful to the publisher for giving us that opportunity because I could see from their perspective - it wasn’t until after the whole tour was announced that I realised she was only doing 8 events on that tour. So…
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J: …to be an independent.
E: A new independent!
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J: There’s a lot of trust there.
E: Yeah, a lot of trust. But it was just amazing.
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J: It goes to show the work you’ve done in the last year to be able to warrant that trust.
E: Yeah, it’s been great to build those relationships, you know. The publicist was very complimentary. But that was a very big deal, very exciting. To literally have the author of Room right there!
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J: So in terms of the Durham Book Festival then, have you been able to contribute towards that much?
E: Yeah, so that was a really fun weekend. They hold all of that programme at the Gala Theatre but we have a sort of mini Fringe going on here. So we hosted events on two of the evenings. We had Cecile Pin on Saturday night to talk about Wandering Souls, which was just wonderful. And again, for me, that was quite a big deal because that got us to - I think, we had two authors off this year’s Women's Prize list. This year we had Camila Grudova for an incredible Indie Bookshop Week event in June, so that was exciting. It’s an amazing book and she was just wonderful. And that was chaired by Naomi Booth who is also a fantastic author, and a great friend of the shop. So that was nice.
We had Charlotte Van den Broeck on the Sunday evening to talk about Bold Ventures. What a great opportunity. So she flew over from Belgium. It’s a hard-to-describe book, very hard to categorise - she writes beautifully and speaks so eloquently about it. She’s a poet but she’s written this kind of prose narrative non-fiction about memoir but also architecture. She was just so open about the kind of risk involved in the creative act and dealing with failure, basically, or being paralysed by your fear of failure, and not doing anything. So that was brilliant. It was really lovely for us to have the opportunity to do that and I guess for the festival to programme those kinds of smaller things that you’re maybe not going to fill a 500-seated theatre but it’s a really quality event. But the really fun thing was on the Friday night we stayed open until 10 o'clock and we had a DJ from 6. And we were packed all night long with people coming in - getting books, getting beers, having a great time. |
J: Did you do any late-night shopping last Christmas?
E: We already do late nights every week anyway. Our standard hours are 8-6 Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Saturday. And we go until 8 o'clock every Thursday and Friday anyway so I didn't put anything extra on last Christmas because we’re kind of already open late. But having had such a great time with the Books and Beats over the festival I’m trying to arrange that again in December, so then we will stay on ‘til 10. I suppose I think of 8 o'clock as late, but that’s because I’ve been here since 8 in the morning!
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J: Yeah, it's a long day. But even just offering those extra three hours after work, for a lot of people, it just means that you can come out and still buy books. Or get a coffee or a drink.
E: Yeah, so I think we will do that in December. We’ll do another late-nighter.
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J: So with your events otherwise then, what’s your capacity in store?
E: We can squeeze 40 in here.
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J: And which other venues have you used?
E: Well, before we had the shop actually we had an events programme, back when I was still just on the van. And obviously, we didn’t hold events in the van. We worked with one of the colleges of the university and hosted some events there, that was at St. Chad’s College; we’ve used the Methodists for the Emma Donoghue event. And then we do off-site sales as well; that’s where it’s not my event but we go to wherever the events are.
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J: Tell us a little about your background and how you got into bookselling.
E: I am a History graduate. I went into the Museum and Heritage sector after university. And I did that for nearly 15 years. So, I was a curator, essentially. I did quite a lot of temporary exhibition work. But then finished the last job I was working in York - I was living in Durham and commuting down to York every day - I worked for York’s Museum Trust. They have some of the most amazing collections, sent out to other regions of the UK. Spread across three sites, they have a Social History Museum, York Castle Museum, Archaeology and Natural History with the Yorkshire Museum, and Fine and Decorative Arts. And I was very fortunate to manage all of those curators across all of those collections. It was a great job, I loved it. But then I was furloughed on the 1st of April 2020.
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J: Which is a lot of people’s story, I guess. Taking a change of direction.
E: Yeah, absolutely. I had a lot of time in 2020 to reflect on what I was doing and what I wanted to do. I’m a bit of cliche in lots of ways. A bit of a cliche of COVID. It’s also a bit of a cliche that I turned 40 in 2022. So, I think probably a culmination of those two things led me to think that I’d had a really good career in one sector but I didn’t necessarily want to do that for the rest of my life. I love working with other people. I realised about myself that I struggle to work for other people. I then spent a year working in a start-up social enterprise where we were delivering online arts learning opportunities for older people with neurological conditions. That was really interesting. I’d only ever worked in public sector organisations, so by that point, to be working in a business and one that is quite agile was really interesting. Ultimately, not for me, but a really interesting learning experience.
And so, whilst I was doing that I was sort of starting to think of books. I love books and have always loved books. I used to quite enjoy playing shop when I was younger. And then I did just sort of have a bit of a lightbulb moment in 2021. I thought I’d really like a bookshop. And I’d like a bookshop in Durham. One of the things I found hard about living here but working in York is that I felt quite disconnected from home and I also felt quite disconnected from work. And I think there are certain sectors where that’s difficult, you have to feel a part of the community that you’re serving. And I was missing that. So yeah, I decided that that was what I was going to do. |
J: So was a bricks-and-mortar shop always on the cards?
E: Well, that was always the plan. It’s so hard to get premises. Who knew it was so hard to get a premises? I was naive really, I think, looking back. It took me the best part of 12 months to get a unit and probably about 6 months into that 12 months I thought there had to be another way to skin this cat. There had to be a quicker way to get going.
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J: Is that when the bus came in?
E: Yeah, I bought a plumber's van and had it kitted out with bookshelves, and bought 1000 books and loaded them onto the van and started going to market. Quite literally.
I started working with publishers once I started doing events. Some of that came from local people or books that had local connections. And that helped root the business in Durham from the beginning. And then it all sort of happened quite quickly after that. So we started with the van in late spring 2022 and then by the summer I had gotten farther with the premises. So it did go quite quickly when it happened. But it was all the months of searching before that that was difficult. The van was just a brilliant way to get going. You learn the basic processes and basic ways of doing things, building relationships, getting the brand name out there, a bit of market testing, you know. Find out how likely it was that people would start shopping in an independent if there was one in Durham. |
J: And I suppose it highlights the importance of your core stock as well? Something that I think a lot of people may underestimate. You think, oh I’ll just get some books. I’ll just stock a shop. But actually, it’s building the list, it’s making sure it’s exactly what you want.
E: Yeah, it’s the hours and hours spent building a spreadsheet.
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J: And it’s a constantly moving thing. An ever-evolving list.
E: It is. And I don’t know if you found this, but I find letting go of books quite hard. You know, if something sells, that decision, do you restock, do you not restock? Because for everything you sell, new titles are coming in all the time.
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J: OK then, let's get onto books. What’s your go-to staff pick?
E: That’s quite difficult. We’re quite different readers in the team. Which is really nice. At the moment, Chetna Maroo’s Western Lane. I’m selling that quite a lot. I read it recently. I was not thrilled by the Booker, shall we say. Chetna is only one of two women on the list. There were more people called Paul on the list than there were women… It’s a fantastic book, I just love it. It’s so beautiful.
So, Clare Keegan is consistently one of our bestsellers, still. I mean, how are there still people who haven’t read Small Things Like These? But apparently, there are. There’s something very Clare Keegan-like about Chetna‘s prose. Very economical but very impactful, and beautiful. The subject matter is quite different, couldn’t be more different. If you told me I was going to love a book which was basically about squash I think I would have struggled. But it’s kind of not about squash. |
SQUASH COULD ALMOST HAVE BEEN ANYTHING. CONSUMED AS A YOUNG PERSON AND GIVES THEM DIRECTION AND IT JUST HAPPENS THAT IN THE BOOK TO BE SQUASH. I JUST LOVE IT, CAN’T RECOMMEND IT ENOUGH. CAN’T SELL IT TO ENOUGH PEOPLE.
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J: What are your customers coming in for at the moment?
E: Demon Copperhead, still. Lots of people who seem to be reading that in their home book groups. That one is still going strong. Helped at the moment by the lovely new indie paperback edition. We didn’t like the paperback jacket if I’m honest. So it’s nice that they’ve gone back to the aesthetic of the hardback for the new paperback edition. So yeah, that is still going well.
Also, the new Banana Yoshimoto [The Premonition] has done well. That one is doing well. And then, our book club book. We have a really well-attended monthly book club, so every month our bookshop choice is one of our bestsellers. So for November, we’re reading Between Dog and Wolf by Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry. I haven’t read it yet but I have to have it read by the 15th. |
J: OK, so, last question. On the week before Halloween, do you have any spooky recommendations for us?
E: Yes. We have a spooky book display going on over there. Brainwyrms by Alison Rumfitt… I’m still so scared.
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J: And for someone maybe slightly less squeamish?
E: I mean, Shirley Jackson, you can’t go wrong. If you’ve not read some Shirley Jackson, it’s the perfect time of year.
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