Richard DrakeDrake the Bookshop, stocktonFor this week’s Bookshop Spotlight we caught up with Richard Drake from the award-winning, independent & family-run, drake the bookshop
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JR: So, I was going to end on it, but actually, I might as well start with it. Obviously in November, Stockton made the news.
RD: Haha, it did indeed.
JR: Now, it's not a huge shock, I think, that this got some press and that you were asked to contribute a few lines.
RD: I think what's quite entertaining is, for those people that know Drake the Bookshop, they'll know that I am one B-word, and Mel is the brains. And so, I'm kind of the person who's more than happy to stand in front of any camera or sit in front of any dictaphone, etc., and have a natter. Mel always sort of, not always, but tends to shy away, which is quite frustrating because the times she has done it, she has knocked it out of the park and demonstrated how it should be done, rather than just me.
But she was in the shop, and the report from the Guardian came in. And it was literally after that Tory activity book had come out. And I was sitting there looking at the display she'd put out going, ‘I'm not sure you can put that, I'm not sure you can put that there, Mel. That's kind of a bit awkward.’
And then Mr Cleverly [James Cleverly MP] came along and gave us the perfect justification for making sure that it was absolutely front and centre.
JR: I mean, as a headline, you know [Cleverly Denies Calling Northern Town A 'S***hole'] it's a pretty easy one to engage with. Did you see much come back after that, much support for the shop?
RD: I've said from almost day one and we'll defend this statement to my dying day, but basically Stockton is a weird place. Stockton is a very bizarre place. We literally have Benefit Street at one end of the town because the series was filmed there and then two or three miles within the same kind of town boundary, Footballer’s Wives with, you know, John Hall's gated community where the insert Middlesbrough and or Newcastle players live there. So it is a crazy thing.
There's a report that says that Hartburn Village, which is a mile from the town centre, the average life expectancy difference between those two places is the greatest in the country. It's a weird, weird place, but oh boy, is it a loyal place! Stockton is tremendously loyal. Yes. Of course, there are people who are doom and gloom and there's nothing in the high street, but the people who want to support Stockton will come out and absolutely support them. And oh my word. Didn't they just. And that was brilliant and it is lovely.
I'd found out from Mel. I'd been at home working on the day and she came home and she says, ‘Have you seen what's happening, have you seen what's happening?’, and I'm like, ‘Oh my word, what's going to happen?!’ And I genuinely was almost in tears reading the article and absolutely seething. It's the kind of case in point that we were talking about earlier on about how the bit between Leeds and Newcastle just feels lost and doesn't get a mention or included.
The point of the whole thing is, that the point of the debate was completely lost. Alex Cunningham was asking a question about why so many children in his constituency were living in poverty.
JR: 34%, or something like that.
RD: And I'm not sure anyone's had an answer to that question at any point. Because guess what, he's a shit MP, apparently. Or it's a shithole, you decide. I know which way I'm going. And I know which way Stockton went. And that was the really interesting point in that the things that are lost, it’s immediately just diverting your attention to something else elsewhere.
JR: And it's been over five months since that was in the news.
RD: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
JR: And still not an answer. As far as I'm aware...
RD: No, no. And yeah, it's a difficult place. Yeah, there's a lot of poverty. Yeah, the council are trying to do things. We're potentially having a visit later today from someone who's coming to do an article on Stockton. And the Stockton council brought two shopping centres and knocked one down. And they're reconnecting the river to the town centre. That space that they're using is three times the size of Trafalgar Square. That isn't half our high street, I don't think. I think it's half a mile from the church down to Lidl. And it's the widest high street in the country, which kind of brings its own problems. Because if, for example, Corbridge or Whitley Bay, you are connected somehow to the people across the street.
JR: Yeah. And it's nice where you are here because you can actually see in the front doors.
RD: Yes, we can actually, yeah. On the side street, off the main street, there is an average-sized street. But you know the high street in Stockton was one lane of traffic space which included the town hall down the middle where all the market sets used to be and then the other side was the other lane of traffic so it's a massive gap between. So there has always been a kind of disconnect, which means that there is not quite that physical close-knit community.
But as I say, the people here are just so incredibly loyal. I mean, I got to meet Paddy O 'Connell, so what's not to like? That was just an absolute treat.
The man is an utter legend. He was an utter joy. He got to meet our book group which was absolutely wonderful but more, well, not more importantly, we had maybe half a dozen people who came along to just sort of have a sound bite about why what was said was so far removed and so wrong. And that is in a nutshell why we're here!
Yeah, we have a bookshop because we were naive enough to believe that that might be a thing. We have a bookshop that people really, really like because the people of Stockton understand the importance of a bookshop, I think, and the importance of reading. I'm not saying in any of that that Stockton is this holy grail that nowhere else is. I was saying earlier, that I've been around quite a few bookshops lately and did my own kind of tour and there's a constant throughout that. And the constant is that there are some people who are really, really motivated, keen, interested in the love of books. They get to know their regular customers. They get to be able to recommend all of those things that you and I have known for seven or eight years as a bookshop owner or manager, those obvious things.
We've just said goodbye to Graham, who has not been well. He came to me the other day and explained how he'd been unwell, and I was just utterly gobsmacked. We are his focal point for the walk, so he will either get the bus into town and walk home or walk into town and get the bus home. And that's why - I said the same thing twice. But he comes in for a coffee and a natter because he knows that this is a safe place for him to come along and somewhere that you'd be welcome to come along as well. And again, another of those cases in point.
RD: Haha, it did indeed.
JR: Now, it's not a huge shock, I think, that this got some press and that you were asked to contribute a few lines.
RD: I think what's quite entertaining is, for those people that know Drake the Bookshop, they'll know that I am one B-word, and Mel is the brains. And so, I'm kind of the person who's more than happy to stand in front of any camera or sit in front of any dictaphone, etc., and have a natter. Mel always sort of, not always, but tends to shy away, which is quite frustrating because the times she has done it, she has knocked it out of the park and demonstrated how it should be done, rather than just me.
But she was in the shop, and the report from the Guardian came in. And it was literally after that Tory activity book had come out. And I was sitting there looking at the display she'd put out going, ‘I'm not sure you can put that, I'm not sure you can put that there, Mel. That's kind of a bit awkward.’
And then Mr Cleverly [James Cleverly MP] came along and gave us the perfect justification for making sure that it was absolutely front and centre.
JR: I mean, as a headline, you know [Cleverly Denies Calling Northern Town A 'S***hole'] it's a pretty easy one to engage with. Did you see much come back after that, much support for the shop?
RD: I've said from almost day one and we'll defend this statement to my dying day, but basically Stockton is a weird place. Stockton is a very bizarre place. We literally have Benefit Street at one end of the town because the series was filmed there and then two or three miles within the same kind of town boundary, Footballer’s Wives with, you know, John Hall's gated community where the insert Middlesbrough and or Newcastle players live there. So it is a crazy thing.
There's a report that says that Hartburn Village, which is a mile from the town centre, the average life expectancy difference between those two places is the greatest in the country. It's a weird, weird place, but oh boy, is it a loyal place! Stockton is tremendously loyal. Yes. Of course, there are people who are doom and gloom and there's nothing in the high street, but the people who want to support Stockton will come out and absolutely support them. And oh my word. Didn't they just. And that was brilliant and it is lovely.
I'd found out from Mel. I'd been at home working on the day and she came home and she says, ‘Have you seen what's happening, have you seen what's happening?’, and I'm like, ‘Oh my word, what's going to happen?!’ And I genuinely was almost in tears reading the article and absolutely seething. It's the kind of case in point that we were talking about earlier on about how the bit between Leeds and Newcastle just feels lost and doesn't get a mention or included.
The point of the whole thing is, that the point of the debate was completely lost. Alex Cunningham was asking a question about why so many children in his constituency were living in poverty.
JR: 34%, or something like that.
RD: And I'm not sure anyone's had an answer to that question at any point. Because guess what, he's a shit MP, apparently. Or it's a shithole, you decide. I know which way I'm going. And I know which way Stockton went. And that was the really interesting point in that the things that are lost, it’s immediately just diverting your attention to something else elsewhere.
JR: And it's been over five months since that was in the news.
RD: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
JR: And still not an answer. As far as I'm aware...
RD: No, no. And yeah, it's a difficult place. Yeah, there's a lot of poverty. Yeah, the council are trying to do things. We're potentially having a visit later today from someone who's coming to do an article on Stockton. And the Stockton council brought two shopping centres and knocked one down. And they're reconnecting the river to the town centre. That space that they're using is three times the size of Trafalgar Square. That isn't half our high street, I don't think. I think it's half a mile from the church down to Lidl. And it's the widest high street in the country, which kind of brings its own problems. Because if, for example, Corbridge or Whitley Bay, you are connected somehow to the people across the street.
JR: Yeah. And it's nice where you are here because you can actually see in the front doors.
RD: Yes, we can actually, yeah. On the side street, off the main street, there is an average-sized street. But you know the high street in Stockton was one lane of traffic space which included the town hall down the middle where all the market sets used to be and then the other side was the other lane of traffic so it's a massive gap between. So there has always been a kind of disconnect, which means that there is not quite that physical close-knit community.
But as I say, the people here are just so incredibly loyal. I mean, I got to meet Paddy O 'Connell, so what's not to like? That was just an absolute treat.
The man is an utter legend. He was an utter joy. He got to meet our book group which was absolutely wonderful but more, well, not more importantly, we had maybe half a dozen people who came along to just sort of have a sound bite about why what was said was so far removed and so wrong. And that is in a nutshell why we're here!
Yeah, we have a bookshop because we were naive enough to believe that that might be a thing. We have a bookshop that people really, really like because the people of Stockton understand the importance of a bookshop, I think, and the importance of reading. I'm not saying in any of that that Stockton is this holy grail that nowhere else is. I was saying earlier, that I've been around quite a few bookshops lately and did my own kind of tour and there's a constant throughout that. And the constant is that there are some people who are really, really motivated, keen, interested in the love of books. They get to know their regular customers. They get to be able to recommend all of those things that you and I have known for seven or eight years as a bookshop owner or manager, those obvious things.
We've just said goodbye to Graham, who has not been well. He came to me the other day and explained how he'd been unwell, and I was just utterly gobsmacked. We are his focal point for the walk, so he will either get the bus into town and walk home or walk into town and get the bus home. And that's why - I said the same thing twice. But he comes in for a coffee and a natter because he knows that this is a safe place for him to come along and somewhere that you'd be welcome to come along as well. And again, another of those cases in point.
JR: You don't need a thriving high street to have a good bookshop, but you do need a supportive community.
RD: Yeah. JR: And it doesn't matter where you are. It doesn't matter what your community situation is. It doesn't matter how big it is. It doesn't matter how affluent it needs to be. But it needs to be culturally minded. It needs to be supportive. I mean, you've got loads of events happening in the area. The theatres put on shows, they’re putting on talks, and big events, and they must get their audiences otherwise they wouldn't do it. RD: But I don't know that anyone in Stockton - that's not quite fair, I think a lot of people in Stockton - would argue that they are cultural. JR: Sure, sure. RD: And I think that's a really interesting word that has maybe been appropriated. That ‘Stocktonians don't do culture’ kind of thing. Ark is there. Tish, which is the... It's on BBC4 at the minute, which was Tish Murtha who grew up in Elswick. |
And she was either given or bought a camera very, very early on in the piece and the photos that she created are just of the area, of the time. And natural because she was part of the community. It debuted at ARC. You've got the Globe and whatever, huge things like Brian Cox, Robin Ince, Six. We Will Rock You, etc, etc. The Stockton International Riverside Festival, the largest street art festival in Europe, he says, questioning whether that's quite right, but it's certainly one of… The equivalent of, I've always liked it, you know, the ‘David Beckham of the street art world’ generally comes to Stockton once a year.
And so there's all of those things that happen, but there's stuff that happens in Stockton. It's not necessarily culture. So it's a really interesting kind of thing. And yeah, I don't think anyone who is rocking into the bookshop is coming in to get their dose of culture. They're coming into because they're readers, they love books, and that's a slightly different thing.
JR: Let's go back to, let's go back to 2014. On a trip to the lakes.
RD: Oh, yeah. All right. Yeah, The Worsworth Bookshop and Cafe, which is no longer there, unfortunately.
JR: And that was enough to convince you that this is what he wanted to do.
RD: Allegedly. Apparently. I think there was a discontent. I think I pretty much felt burnt out as far as education had gone. I sort of lost my way and moved thinking the grass would be greener.
We were looking for somewhere that we could kind of escape. My mum was a GP. When she finished work some weekends she would just go away back to Skipton, which is where she's from. And it might only be Saturday afternoon she arrived, but it would feel as though she'd had a long time off and she was away from home and therefore wasn't going to do any work. And I was kind of looking for some sort of bolt hole a little bit like that.
We were in a fortunate position that it might have been a thing, and then yeah Matthew still denies all knowledge of this but when he said, ‘Are you going to do it, then?’ Because seemingly we just talked about it quite a lot. I Googled ‘Where'd you buy books in bulk?’ and Gardners came up and became our fairy godmother. To the extent that Bertrams and Gardners were the two wholesalers at that time, and I didn't even consider looking at Bertrams as a thing. They answered all those stupid questions like, ‘I can't find anywhere but what about a double-decker bus and I could just drive around and stuff?’, and she was like, ‘Yes, Richard.’ And then she'd allow me to have the space to realise that that was a ridiculous idea.
JR: So then fast forward slightly to September 22nd 2015. How'd you find the space?
RD: We looked around in Yarm and I genuinely think if we'd been in Yarm we wouldn't be there anymore for two or three reasons. One, the space that we had been offered that was then given to somebody else from the person that was already leasing it would have been far, far, far, far, far too small and far, far, far, too expensive. And also I don't think we would have been able to work around the business model that we had. That idea of wanting to bring literature to kids in Teesside and the Tees Valley who are not getting that all day every day. I think would have been a very tricky thing to do from an affluent market town like Yarm rather than a high street like Stockton.
I don't mean that rudely, I just think that would have been a bit disingenuous potentially to say, ‘Isn't everyone in Teeside struggling?’ when you're sitting in the middle of Yarm High Street. I think it was a friend who mentioned that the council had this arcade which is a business incubator which allowed you to lease a small section of space in a big old department store. So we kind of rocked up, signed the lease, went to the Gardners trade show on the Sunday had the books arrive on the Monday, which everyone sort of stared at us open mouth going, ‘What, you're here and you're opening essentially in two day’s time?!’ I'm like, yeah, it’s a lot less grandiose than it sounds. I think some of the stands there were bigger than our shop quite frankly.
And so there's all of those things that happen, but there's stuff that happens in Stockton. It's not necessarily culture. So it's a really interesting kind of thing. And yeah, I don't think anyone who is rocking into the bookshop is coming in to get their dose of culture. They're coming into because they're readers, they love books, and that's a slightly different thing.
JR: Let's go back to, let's go back to 2014. On a trip to the lakes.
RD: Oh, yeah. All right. Yeah, The Worsworth Bookshop and Cafe, which is no longer there, unfortunately.
JR: And that was enough to convince you that this is what he wanted to do.
RD: Allegedly. Apparently. I think there was a discontent. I think I pretty much felt burnt out as far as education had gone. I sort of lost my way and moved thinking the grass would be greener.
We were looking for somewhere that we could kind of escape. My mum was a GP. When she finished work some weekends she would just go away back to Skipton, which is where she's from. And it might only be Saturday afternoon she arrived, but it would feel as though she'd had a long time off and she was away from home and therefore wasn't going to do any work. And I was kind of looking for some sort of bolt hole a little bit like that.
We were in a fortunate position that it might have been a thing, and then yeah Matthew still denies all knowledge of this but when he said, ‘Are you going to do it, then?’ Because seemingly we just talked about it quite a lot. I Googled ‘Where'd you buy books in bulk?’ and Gardners came up and became our fairy godmother. To the extent that Bertrams and Gardners were the two wholesalers at that time, and I didn't even consider looking at Bertrams as a thing. They answered all those stupid questions like, ‘I can't find anywhere but what about a double-decker bus and I could just drive around and stuff?’, and she was like, ‘Yes, Richard.’ And then she'd allow me to have the space to realise that that was a ridiculous idea.
JR: So then fast forward slightly to September 22nd 2015. How'd you find the space?
RD: We looked around in Yarm and I genuinely think if we'd been in Yarm we wouldn't be there anymore for two or three reasons. One, the space that we had been offered that was then given to somebody else from the person that was already leasing it would have been far, far, far, far, far too small and far, far, far, too expensive. And also I don't think we would have been able to work around the business model that we had. That idea of wanting to bring literature to kids in Teesside and the Tees Valley who are not getting that all day every day. I think would have been a very tricky thing to do from an affluent market town like Yarm rather than a high street like Stockton.
I don't mean that rudely, I just think that would have been a bit disingenuous potentially to say, ‘Isn't everyone in Teeside struggling?’ when you're sitting in the middle of Yarm High Street. I think it was a friend who mentioned that the council had this arcade which is a business incubator which allowed you to lease a small section of space in a big old department store. So we kind of rocked up, signed the lease, went to the Gardners trade show on the Sunday had the books arrive on the Monday, which everyone sort of stared at us open mouth going, ‘What, you're here and you're opening essentially in two day’s time?!’ I'm like, yeah, it’s a lot less grandiose than it sounds. I think some of the stands there were bigger than our shop quite frankly.
JR: So a small footprint but low rent?
RD: Oh, ridiculously and all in and just gave us that opportunity to get to know customers. I didn't have to have customers queuing out the door and I didn't have to get rid of them very, very quickly because I needed to sell thousands and thousands of books to pay the rent. So we got to know, you know, we still see on a regular basis the people who ordered the first ever customer order, which was Julia Donaldson's The Troll. And it's just silly little things like that, that you just kind of remember because you could. There weren't hundreds of books going out the door, so you could remember those. But also, it was a very manual system, you know, we were writing down the books that we sold along the way and so on and so forth. The stock system is still about as accurate as it was then because I'm fairly confident that we missed as many books as we do scanning them out these days. JR: So what happened then then? Was it an increase in footfall? Do you think you just got your name out there? Because within a year you've moved to Silver Street. |
RD: Yeah, the intention was Stockton was getting a bookshop whether they wanted it or not, I think. A potentially kind of naive belief, you know, we were potentially going to move out very, very quickly. We were still actively looking for a space, so 125 square feet is what we opened in. A month later we doubled that to 250 square feet and we lived in that space for a year, but we very early on engaged and sent out emails to schools and we had some schools come and see us and find out what we did.
It was a little tricky, you could always feel that schools weren't necessarily prepared to get wholly invested because, technically speaking, we could be a short-term operation from where we were. I think once you've got your own bricks-and-mortar sort of establishment, they're more prepared to accept you're going to carry on existing.
But we tried to do some events, we tried to set things up. I mean, our very first author event was Nick Sharratt. It's kind of quite a high bar, ultimately, isn't it? When you look at it from that point of view and with no real idea. I remember pacing up and down in the arcade that afternoon. ‘Does he turn up?’, ‘Is he going to turn up?’, ‘What happens if he doesn't turn up?’, ‘How many people are going to turn up?’ You know. One of my best friends from Scarborough came along. So it was one of those, again, people supporting the community who want to get involved and we did some events.
We did some events in the shop, we did some book groups in the shop, we did... We did school events, IBW. We got two or three authors out and about in schools and stuff. So the intention was always to do it as a very professionally run setup. I'm not saying that no one else did, but our intention was, we are a bookshop. There's a till and a credit card machine. Because it’s from the outset what we wanted to do. And then we're looking around for the space, the space came up and yeah, pretty much exactly a year. In fact, the Tuesday that we were setting up - I was thinking about the other day - we'd put newspaper over the window saying, coming soon and keeping everyone kind of interested. And then we kind of cut a little bit out because the second Jim Kay Harry Potter had come out. So we kind of had to have that in the window because not least of all, we'd forgotten that we got some pre-orders. So we had to technically open the door.
We opened. We had customers who wanted to come along. Some customers helped us with putting the bookcases together. It really was and still is a real community feel about that whole kind of scenario, you know.
JR: It's a big move going from a small footprint to a high street.
RD: We worked out that our counter space [now] was about the size of our first shop. I'm not saying bookshops are the only shops that do this, but there is much more of a community feel about it. I've said countless times that the conversation which can spark in the shop between two people who are standing at opposite ends of the shop. I'll go back to our stock-in-trade, Leonard and Hungry Paul, being the case in point.
JR: Yeah!
RD: You can have a discussion and you can tell someone about it. It's a brilliant book. It's fantastic. I'm not completely convinced nextdoor, the gentleman’s outfitters, which is a lovely shop, but I don't know that there's a discussion about shirts or trousers that goes on there in the same way that there is a discussion about books and why you like this book and so on and so forth.
JR: There are these books, there are series that run through the industry in ways that that's hard to define. Leonard and Hungry Paul's a great example. I'd say half of the bookshops that I've interviewed since October have mentioned that book in one way or another, you know, as being a back-pocket staff recommend. It's always in stock or it's the kind of thing that you always want in stock and everybody seems to just sell the hell out of it.
RD: It's an interesting one. Even more, I think there's one person I know who wasn't a fan and they've not finished it so they don't count. But I don't think there's anyone that comes through that door that I can't recommend it to. And I find it really difficult to think of anything else that I can recommend to every kind of reader. Because it is just such a special, gentle read.
But, yeah, it isn't just that, you can have a spark of conversation about whichever author is local to, or... And I think that is different to flowers, cards, clothes, you know, bikes.
JR: And booksellers talking to booksellers is a big thing. More so than any industry that I'm aware of. And it's not just supportive, it's also just about the love of the thing you're selling. It's not just about how well you're doing, but it's actually talking about the books you've read. And that seems unique.
RD: That collaboration. I suppose, coming from a teaching background where you would go to college, for instance, you share notes or you share lesson ideas etc., etc. that might be the closest. As we were saying earlier, teaching to bookselling seems to be a thing. Maybe there’s a reason why.
JR: As a teacher coming into bookselling, did you always anticipate being a children's specialist or did you want to do a bit of everything?
RD: It's interesting, I was going to say that we don’t consider ourselves - I am definitely a children’s specialist - but I don't know that the bookshop is. But I take the point. I think I know less, generally speaking, about what's next door in the old shop, which is the general fiction and the non -fiction than I do in here [in the kid's shop]. But that's a funny one. Yeah, I think kids' books are just so amazing!
It was a little tricky, you could always feel that schools weren't necessarily prepared to get wholly invested because, technically speaking, we could be a short-term operation from where we were. I think once you've got your own bricks-and-mortar sort of establishment, they're more prepared to accept you're going to carry on existing.
But we tried to do some events, we tried to set things up. I mean, our very first author event was Nick Sharratt. It's kind of quite a high bar, ultimately, isn't it? When you look at it from that point of view and with no real idea. I remember pacing up and down in the arcade that afternoon. ‘Does he turn up?’, ‘Is he going to turn up?’, ‘What happens if he doesn't turn up?’, ‘How many people are going to turn up?’ You know. One of my best friends from Scarborough came along. So it was one of those, again, people supporting the community who want to get involved and we did some events.
We did some events in the shop, we did some book groups in the shop, we did... We did school events, IBW. We got two or three authors out and about in schools and stuff. So the intention was always to do it as a very professionally run setup. I'm not saying that no one else did, but our intention was, we are a bookshop. There's a till and a credit card machine. Because it’s from the outset what we wanted to do. And then we're looking around for the space, the space came up and yeah, pretty much exactly a year. In fact, the Tuesday that we were setting up - I was thinking about the other day - we'd put newspaper over the window saying, coming soon and keeping everyone kind of interested. And then we kind of cut a little bit out because the second Jim Kay Harry Potter had come out. So we kind of had to have that in the window because not least of all, we'd forgotten that we got some pre-orders. So we had to technically open the door.
We opened. We had customers who wanted to come along. Some customers helped us with putting the bookcases together. It really was and still is a real community feel about that whole kind of scenario, you know.
JR: It's a big move going from a small footprint to a high street.
RD: We worked out that our counter space [now] was about the size of our first shop. I'm not saying bookshops are the only shops that do this, but there is much more of a community feel about it. I've said countless times that the conversation which can spark in the shop between two people who are standing at opposite ends of the shop. I'll go back to our stock-in-trade, Leonard and Hungry Paul, being the case in point.
JR: Yeah!
RD: You can have a discussion and you can tell someone about it. It's a brilliant book. It's fantastic. I'm not completely convinced nextdoor, the gentleman’s outfitters, which is a lovely shop, but I don't know that there's a discussion about shirts or trousers that goes on there in the same way that there is a discussion about books and why you like this book and so on and so forth.
JR: There are these books, there are series that run through the industry in ways that that's hard to define. Leonard and Hungry Paul's a great example. I'd say half of the bookshops that I've interviewed since October have mentioned that book in one way or another, you know, as being a back-pocket staff recommend. It's always in stock or it's the kind of thing that you always want in stock and everybody seems to just sell the hell out of it.
RD: It's an interesting one. Even more, I think there's one person I know who wasn't a fan and they've not finished it so they don't count. But I don't think there's anyone that comes through that door that I can't recommend it to. And I find it really difficult to think of anything else that I can recommend to every kind of reader. Because it is just such a special, gentle read.
But, yeah, it isn't just that, you can have a spark of conversation about whichever author is local to, or... And I think that is different to flowers, cards, clothes, you know, bikes.
JR: And booksellers talking to booksellers is a big thing. More so than any industry that I'm aware of. And it's not just supportive, it's also just about the love of the thing you're selling. It's not just about how well you're doing, but it's actually talking about the books you've read. And that seems unique.
RD: That collaboration. I suppose, coming from a teaching background where you would go to college, for instance, you share notes or you share lesson ideas etc., etc. that might be the closest. As we were saying earlier, teaching to bookselling seems to be a thing. Maybe there’s a reason why.
JR: As a teacher coming into bookselling, did you always anticipate being a children's specialist or did you want to do a bit of everything?
RD: It's interesting, I was going to say that we don’t consider ourselves - I am definitely a children’s specialist - but I don't know that the bookshop is. But I take the point. I think I know less, generally speaking, about what's next door in the old shop, which is the general fiction and the non -fiction than I do in here [in the kid's shop]. But that's a funny one. Yeah, I think kids' books are just so amazing!
When I was teaching, I just read crime. Peter Robinson, Jack Reacher, Peter May and Peter James. They're essentially the stock-in-trade. And my argument for that was always because it didn't matter how much of the book I slept through, someone would tell me what happened at the end. That's how crime fiction works. It’s great.
JR: It's ready escapism! RD: Yeah, I think so. And then, you know, our book group gets us all reading out of our comfort zone. I've definitely read a whole bunch of stuff that I wouldn't have ever read. There are three favourite phrases in book club - 1. ‘It needed a good edit’. 2. hilariously, the first thing that everybody does when they get the book is look to see how many pages it is, what size the text is and whether there are any bits that they won't need to read, like pictures in the non-fiction stuff and whether they count. This doesn't really seem to be how a book club should work. JR: Yeah, like how efficient is it. RD: But also, the other thing is, ‘I'd never have picked that book up’. Beryl being one of the biggest [examples], the book about Beryl the cyclist [Jeremy Wilson] who again lived not too far away, lived in in Ripon and Harrogate. |
An astonishing non-fiction read, absolutely mind-blowing. The author's black book ranges from the Russian doctor who blew the Sochi drug scandal to AP McCoy to Chris Hoy. It‘s a phenomenal read and everyone in the group thoroughly enjoyed it, and a number of times it was, ‘I'd have never picked that up!’
But actually, give me a kid's book any day. Because they're quick to read, which might be a bit of a problem if you can only afford so many books, but they are so well written and they are SO engaging.
If I look back, my favourite kid's book still is, I think, The Machine Gunners. I read that when it came out when I was a kid. But it still sticks with me as an absolute legend, as far as books go. But the number of books these days that you could pick up and just completely get lost in, versus when I was growing up. We're coming up to nine, maybe ten-eleven years ago, the explosion in the quality of kids' literature is just phenomenal!
JR: And so from 2016, obviously you were in about half the premises you are now. But you're doing very well. I mean, seemingly slightly isolated in Stockton but working outwards actively, working with schools, and libraries, putting on events, and working far larger than your footprint.
RD: I think we are fortunate and I'm hoping I don't tread on on any toes. There are Waterstones who do do some events but not the number that I would argue we do. And the other indies are maybe not quite as active with schools as we are. So having taught in Redcar and Cleveland I have connections there which was a bit of a tricky one early on because it was two local authorities across so there was a jump that had to be made. I've connected with the schools in Stockton but we've got Redcar, Middlesbrough, Stockton, Hartlepool, and Darlington as an area which has an awful lot of schools and not very many bookshops that do school events.
So yes, as I say, I hope I haven't stood on any toes. This is a thing around the book industry. We're territorial in as much as we're aware of other people's territory rather than our own, if that makes sense, we don't want to go beyond where we feel as though we should be going.
JR: It's being self-aware enough, or aware of the community itself and what they’re after.
RD: Yeah, I mean, what quite often happens is I'll rock up into a school, chuck my jacket in the corner and immediately go on stage and start and then suddenly realise that this really shy retiring author that spends 11 months a year in their own room talking to characters in their head who’s quaking their boots in a corner. So I have to be aware of getting to venues slightly earlier with some authors for that reason. I’m always happy to kind of rock up and get on with it.
JR: But as a bookseller you're always wearing different hats, you know, and it is quite often just as a support to the author.
Obviously we've known each other for a little while now, but I’ve been looking back ahead of our chat and I think 2018, was it? 2018 felt like a big year for Drake. Winner of the Nibbies for the North, of course. But actually, what I look back on and think about is the Nicola Davies campaign and how much work that went into that.
Can you tell us a bit about that?
RD: Yeah, so that was when everyone, or loads of people, were Crowdfunding for getting The Lost Spells into schools. Which is a fantastic book. It's a brilliant book, but with the best will in the world, I'm not completely convinced that the kids in The Tees Valley necessarily know what a bramble is, or how rare an adder is and things like that. And I am not saying that they shouldn't go to the countryside, they should go to the countryside. There is lot of amazing countryside around here.
I point you in the direction out the window north you can almost see the opening scene of Blade Runner because Ridley Scott's from Billingham. If we go 180 degrees the other way we're on the edge of North Yorkshire Moors. Again, it's a weird place is this area. Very, very weird.
Jan, our Walker rep, who's recently retired, was talking about The Day War Came. Nicola Davies' fantastic book which was written after a piece in the Guardian about the child found on Lampedusa Beach. And we here in the Tees Valley are set up as a city of sanctuary. We work with the first sanctuary-seeking school in the Tees Valley as well so it all just seemed to make sense to Crowdfund it. So, we got a book in every school in the Tees Valley. And again, it’s about book readers. Mari at Edinburgh’s Lighthouse Bookshop talks about ‘solidarity not charity’ and about book lovers helping book lovers and that's kind of a principle that has been worked on and channelled a lot.
And then I can't even remember how it came about, whether it was through a chat with Nicola or from the school, or whether it just suddenly came as an idea. I don’t imagine it's the last one because that wouldn't have been how I work. But we suggested that maybe the schools could do some work and if they wanted to showcase the work it may be that we'd be able to Nicola up and we could do something with it.
So we did a day of events where Nicola came and met some schools and then the following day we did a trip around 12 schools! We'd asked in advance if people could sign us in so we didn't have to do the slow signing-in when we got there. Not all the schools could, some schools did, and some schools couldn't. We definitely did a Charlie's Angels pose for the penultimate school because we kind of lost the will to live... So we maybe got into a spot of trouble but the stuff that the schools have done was amazing.
I've got emotional thinking about it now, which is crazy because we definitely took a moment in the car that day. The Day The War Came is basically, in brief, about a child who isn't from the town, has become a refugee because of war and isn’t allowed into school. Is not allowed in school because the teacher says there isn’t a chair for them. And so, the next day the child comes along, knocks on the door with a chair and the child goes to school. And so, the chairs are the real key focal point throughout the book.
Tilory Primary School had really properly gone to town on this. They put together a procession, a guard of chairs from where the car was going to be parked into the school hall. I mean, that's kind of probably 30 yards of chairs. It was ridiculous. And then all the way to the reading chair where Nicola sat and read. Then we saw the work that they'd done. It was just utterly mind-blowing. We reached, as I say, I think 12 schools across the day. At one of the other schools, their caretaker's an artist and he had created a poppy in the stairwell and the poppy was made of all the children's thumbprints. So Nicola was asked to formally open that as a thing. And it was mind-blowing. It was a brilliant day. A lot of fun. Very tiring!
But it demonstrated on all those levels back to where we were. The support from the region, the kids just properly engaging and rolling with it and flying with it and it was, yeah, it's one of those where I kind of forget about it for a little while and then yeah… Yeah, I remember it, there was a lot of warmth around that.
But actually, give me a kid's book any day. Because they're quick to read, which might be a bit of a problem if you can only afford so many books, but they are so well written and they are SO engaging.
If I look back, my favourite kid's book still is, I think, The Machine Gunners. I read that when it came out when I was a kid. But it still sticks with me as an absolute legend, as far as books go. But the number of books these days that you could pick up and just completely get lost in, versus when I was growing up. We're coming up to nine, maybe ten-eleven years ago, the explosion in the quality of kids' literature is just phenomenal!
JR: And so from 2016, obviously you were in about half the premises you are now. But you're doing very well. I mean, seemingly slightly isolated in Stockton but working outwards actively, working with schools, and libraries, putting on events, and working far larger than your footprint.
RD: I think we are fortunate and I'm hoping I don't tread on on any toes. There are Waterstones who do do some events but not the number that I would argue we do. And the other indies are maybe not quite as active with schools as we are. So having taught in Redcar and Cleveland I have connections there which was a bit of a tricky one early on because it was two local authorities across so there was a jump that had to be made. I've connected with the schools in Stockton but we've got Redcar, Middlesbrough, Stockton, Hartlepool, and Darlington as an area which has an awful lot of schools and not very many bookshops that do school events.
So yes, as I say, I hope I haven't stood on any toes. This is a thing around the book industry. We're territorial in as much as we're aware of other people's territory rather than our own, if that makes sense, we don't want to go beyond where we feel as though we should be going.
JR: It's being self-aware enough, or aware of the community itself and what they’re after.
RD: Yeah, I mean, what quite often happens is I'll rock up into a school, chuck my jacket in the corner and immediately go on stage and start and then suddenly realise that this really shy retiring author that spends 11 months a year in their own room talking to characters in their head who’s quaking their boots in a corner. So I have to be aware of getting to venues slightly earlier with some authors for that reason. I’m always happy to kind of rock up and get on with it.
JR: But as a bookseller you're always wearing different hats, you know, and it is quite often just as a support to the author.
Obviously we've known each other for a little while now, but I’ve been looking back ahead of our chat and I think 2018, was it? 2018 felt like a big year for Drake. Winner of the Nibbies for the North, of course. But actually, what I look back on and think about is the Nicola Davies campaign and how much work that went into that.
Can you tell us a bit about that?
RD: Yeah, so that was when everyone, or loads of people, were Crowdfunding for getting The Lost Spells into schools. Which is a fantastic book. It's a brilliant book, but with the best will in the world, I'm not completely convinced that the kids in The Tees Valley necessarily know what a bramble is, or how rare an adder is and things like that. And I am not saying that they shouldn't go to the countryside, they should go to the countryside. There is lot of amazing countryside around here.
I point you in the direction out the window north you can almost see the opening scene of Blade Runner because Ridley Scott's from Billingham. If we go 180 degrees the other way we're on the edge of North Yorkshire Moors. Again, it's a weird place is this area. Very, very weird.
Jan, our Walker rep, who's recently retired, was talking about The Day War Came. Nicola Davies' fantastic book which was written after a piece in the Guardian about the child found on Lampedusa Beach. And we here in the Tees Valley are set up as a city of sanctuary. We work with the first sanctuary-seeking school in the Tees Valley as well so it all just seemed to make sense to Crowdfund it. So, we got a book in every school in the Tees Valley. And again, it’s about book readers. Mari at Edinburgh’s Lighthouse Bookshop talks about ‘solidarity not charity’ and about book lovers helping book lovers and that's kind of a principle that has been worked on and channelled a lot.
And then I can't even remember how it came about, whether it was through a chat with Nicola or from the school, or whether it just suddenly came as an idea. I don’t imagine it's the last one because that wouldn't have been how I work. But we suggested that maybe the schools could do some work and if they wanted to showcase the work it may be that we'd be able to Nicola up and we could do something with it.
So we did a day of events where Nicola came and met some schools and then the following day we did a trip around 12 schools! We'd asked in advance if people could sign us in so we didn't have to do the slow signing-in when we got there. Not all the schools could, some schools did, and some schools couldn't. We definitely did a Charlie's Angels pose for the penultimate school because we kind of lost the will to live... So we maybe got into a spot of trouble but the stuff that the schools have done was amazing.
I've got emotional thinking about it now, which is crazy because we definitely took a moment in the car that day. The Day The War Came is basically, in brief, about a child who isn't from the town, has become a refugee because of war and isn’t allowed into school. Is not allowed in school because the teacher says there isn’t a chair for them. And so, the next day the child comes along, knocks on the door with a chair and the child goes to school. And so, the chairs are the real key focal point throughout the book.
Tilory Primary School had really properly gone to town on this. They put together a procession, a guard of chairs from where the car was going to be parked into the school hall. I mean, that's kind of probably 30 yards of chairs. It was ridiculous. And then all the way to the reading chair where Nicola sat and read. Then we saw the work that they'd done. It was just utterly mind-blowing. We reached, as I say, I think 12 schools across the day. At one of the other schools, their caretaker's an artist and he had created a poppy in the stairwell and the poppy was made of all the children's thumbprints. So Nicola was asked to formally open that as a thing. And it was mind-blowing. It was a brilliant day. A lot of fun. Very tiring!
But it demonstrated on all those levels back to where we were. The support from the region, the kids just properly engaging and rolling with it and flying with it and it was, yeah, it's one of those where I kind of forget about it for a little while and then yeah… Yeah, I remember it, there was a lot of warmth around that.