jonathan taylor-blair

golden hare books, edinburgh

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On the cusp of the Christmas period, we caught up with Jonathan of Golden Hare Books - an award-winning indie situated in Edinburgh’s Stockbridge neighbourhood and a must-see spot for any book lover - where we delved into their bookselling background, Christmas bestseller predictions and current favourite reads.

It’s not something people talk about a lot but that’s what’s great about independent bookshops. We’re doing it because we care about it, and we love these books.

James (JR) : So, Jonathan, I wanted to quickly reiterate what I’m doing, what this is all about. It all started from working as a bookseller.

I guess, what I wanted to do is use this platform as a way to show off some of my favourite bookshops and hopefully over time get to discover new ones. And I thought, as well, that unless you’re in the book world you don't get to see behind the scenes. You don’t get to see what booksellers do. And this is a little like seeing behind the curtain and into the stock room. It’s about all those little things that people don’t get to experience.

So many booksellers I’ve spoken to over the years have come from such a diverse range of backgrounds and they all bring something new to the table. Something different. We’re all so keen to talk to authors that we forget to talk to booksellers. The more of these conversations we have, hopefully, we’ll find some common ground, or maybe there’s a thread running through them all that I can pick up with new bookshops, or maybe there are some veterans who’ve been doing this way longer than we have, you know. We’ll see how much has changed and how much hasn’t. 

JTB: Yeah, yeah. It’s really interesting. It’s one of the things I most enjoy. I’ve never been super interested in going to the London Book Fair or any of the big conferences, I think maybe that’s because I worked at Waterstones for 11 years. I’ve now been at Golden Hare for 5. But it’s the speaking to other booksellers, that’s what I find valuable, not all the seminars they do. I find it quite tiresome and I’m not that interested. But I’m interested in speaking to other booksellers. 

JR: I always felt that you get more from talking to each other than you do sitting in a conference room, you know. Obviously, you’re in Edinburgh, so maybe you have a few more opportunities to see reps or get to go to bookseller socials. Maybe it is more beneficial for those smaller, more remote shops?

JTB: I guess so, yeah. Being in Edinburgh we’re quite used to, or quite privileged to have so many bookshops around. My brother works in Lighthouse Books, and I know people in pretty much every bookshop in Edinburgh, you know. So again, it must be nice to meet up. Like the people in the highlands, if they want to go down.
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​I think I’m used to working at Waterstones for such a long time, I’ve always had a very small amount of patience with nonsense and my time being wasted… So yeah, immediately my hackles come up when any sort of presentation is mentioned or anything like that. I like selling books. I like being on the shop floor talking to people. You think I’d get a little used to it now that I’m in a more senior position at Golden Hare but I don’t think I’m ever going to calm down about it, to be honest.

JR: Initially when you start you think, is this just par for the course…?

JTB: I think that because of the situation we’re in at Golden Hare, where I’m Assistant Manager and Polly is Manager, we don’t own the shop. We don’t have to worry about that so much. We’re in a slightly different position to a lot of other indie bookshops where, you know, this is my job. And I’m quite good at switching off when I go home. Because Mark, the owner… He wants the shop to look good. He wants it to be a nice place to be, and he wants us to not go bust. Basically. So I guess we’re not pushed in a way that other bookshops are, or feel they need to be to get ahead. We do pretty well where we are and so, if Mark is happy… We want to make the bookshop a nice place to be and run it well. But I never feel like we have to push it to be the best bookshop in the world. Or push to get all these opportunities. We’re really lucky and privileged to be in the situation we’re in. 

When I first started here, Jules, who you’ve probably met before, was the manager. The shop wasn’t doing very well before she started and she came on and she did such amazing stuff, she grew the shop from nothing to somewhere that people talk about. We won Indie Bookshop of the Year in 2019 and so many amazing things after. She left just as the pandemic started, and we had another manager come in. And [since then] we’ve just been like, ‘We’re a good bookshop, we do good stuff’. But the amount of time that Jules put into it, it’s not something we’re willing to do. She ran it like she owned it. So would work from home all the time. And do tonnes of extra hours.

​So we’re in a position where we don’t have to do that. Which is a really good position to be in. So yeah, I don’t have to go to these things. So that’s maybe why. It’s a nice position to be in, I think.

JR: Yeah, I understand completely. I took everything to heart. And you do take it home. And you lose sleep. And then in reality what we all get a kick from is selling books. And finding new readers for those books. Eventually, you end up doing more admin than bookselling. Especially after the lockdown, after the pandemic, you start looking at your time as something you really should value, you know. You turn yourself into a bookseller but you lose a bit of yourself.

JTB: Absolutely, I have to say I follow lots of bookshops online but it’s healthier for me if I mute them all. Especially just after lockdown I would see other bookshops and think, that’s really cool why aren’t we doing that thing? Why aren’t we doing these things? And I sort of had to learn not to take it home so much. Which I’m very good at now.
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​Again, it’s lucky that I’m not pushed to do it. But Polly wants us to be healthy and enjoy our jobs as much as we can. It’s still hard, you know. There are great things about working in books, there are such great things, you meet such amazing people, and you get all these wonderful things to do, but it’s still hard. It’s not easy.

JR: Yeah, when it comes down to it, you’re city centre retail. You can have crazy times.
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How does the book festival affect you every year? It brings so many people into the city centre. I’ve been there when it’s crazy. And then of course you have Christmas…

JTB: So, previously the book festival was just in Charlotte’s Square. We get so many publicists and publishers coming down to the shop, authors would pop in. And that was great. But also, we’re a really small shop, so sometimes it’s just me working or it’s just Polly working. And there’s increased footfall by everyone. Because Edinburgh’s just so busy. It’s our busiest time outside of Christmas. This year especially, it’s been really busy. And we had publicist come down, which was good, but also it’s one of our busiest times of the year. I have 4 boxes next to me, I have a line of customers. It’s really good but it’s also a massive pain to juggle all this stuff. We’ve just not got so much time in the day. 

The most important thing for me, always, is that the shop looks good. And that we’ve got good books. And we can serve customers properly. And I can't do that if I constantly have to perform a little bit. And in August we don’t have time. 

But since it moved we get fewer people coming down. Our footfall sales-wise hasn't gone down, we just see fewer publicists. You know how busy the town can get, it’s just dropped off a little, which I’m not too fussed about, to be honest. People who love books come to Edinburgh in August, which is a great thing. But we’re sort of slightly out of the way now which is quite nice.

JR: Just to give people who maybe haven’t been to Edinburgh in a while or haven’t visited you before, could you give us an idea of the size of the shop? ​

JTB: So, we have two full-time members of staff, that’s me and Polly, then we have three part-time and one person who just does one day a week. We had a bookseller called Jenna who’s amazing, they were doing three days a week but they’ve moved to The Portobello Bookshop now for a full-time role. So we’re a member down right now. Normally there are two members of staff in the shop a day, if we have an event then it’ll be me on my own in the morning and another member of staff will come in later to do the event. No more than two people, to be honest. If there’s more than that outside of Christmas there’s just nothing to do. 
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We have maybe 2,500-3000 books, more like 3000 at Christmas. We’re so wee. We’re a tiny shop. We just have me and Polly. We sort of mix it up really. Polly deals with a lot of the banking. I do the accounting and returns. We work quite well together. Polly’s been doing this for about 20 years now and I’ve been doing it for 16. So it’s nice when we get new staff in because they’re excited about books. I wouldn’t say we’re jaded but we’ve sort of seen everything now. We’ve seen it all. 

JR: It’s hard to get excited about returns… It’s good to get some new blood in to bring that excitement back.

JTB: Yeah, it was great when Gemma started last August. They read more than anyone else, more than anyone I’ve met in my entire life. They’re just really excited. And it’s sort of rubbed off on us all again, and we’re like, ‘Oh, yeah, books are great! Forget about the booking in and returns for a little bit and let’s just talk about books’, which is really cool. 

So yeah, we’re a really small team, we’re a small shop. I think the special thing about us is that we have a nice atmosphere. We try and make the shop look as good as possible, try to give great customer service. It’s not something people talk about a lot but that’s what’s great about independent bookshops. We’re doing it because we care about it, and we love these books. We want people to read the books that we want to shout about. And that’s the most interesting thing. And I think people forget about that. And again, I think there are bad things… But there are good things about working for Waterstones in that you have to think about how the shop looks from a customer’s perspective, and how you want the shelves to look. I think the rigidity there is good. And coming into a smaller place where there are maybe not as many guidelines about what you can do. So I want the shop to be a nice place. To have nice books. And to have nice chats with customers.

JR: I think a well-curated smaller stock is always a bit more welcoming. I think with mountains of titles that you’re never going to look through there are good things and bad things about it. Toppings is a good example. You can just have too much stock. I think, for me, and for a lot of the booksellers I’ve spoken to with smaller shops, or who have worked in smaller shops, you enjoy the challenge of curating a smaller number of books. 

​And as a customer, I’d rather browse fewer really good books.

JTB: Yeah, that’s it. You can browse the whole shop here in 40 minutes. Like, properly. And I think that’s a really good amount of time. Some people aren’t going to be happy that we don’t have a large military history section but, you know, I don’t care. Couldn’t care less. We only have small shelves. So what deserves to be on that shelf? What’s going to sell and what do we think is good? And how do we fit it in there? Which is a challenge, especially in September and October.

​I feel like it’s the case that there’s been more publishing this year than in the last couple of years. You want to order all the books that you love but we just can’t fit them on the shelf when they come in. You’d think I’d have it down by now after 4 or 5 years doing it. But you just get too excited sometimes. 

JR: It’s easily done! The big machine is just firing out so much. You end up tripping over books that you forgot you ordered. It’s hard to stay enthusiastic when the numbers or so big.

JTB: I was planning the ordering of our Christmas stock a few weeks ago and then even this week I was like, ‘I forgot about this book, and this book!’ How did I forget about these books which were popular in say February, March, and April? How did I forget about that one? There are just too many books in my tiny, tiny head.

​When I started working at Waterstones you could still order the stock you wanted, you still saw reps. But that was phased out about a year later. At that time I was really into comic books, which I thought would be great. But we were in a small shopping centre on the outskirts of Edinburgh and no one bought any of the graphic novels that I bought in. I love this stuff but maybe it wasn't right. So I had to reign it in. That’s how you learn. It’s a balancing act.

JR: And do you find that with events as well? You have to be picky, especially where you are. How do you find events? I know you did Caroline Eden last week, for Black Sea, which I love, and then you did Interpret Magazine as well, is that right? Can you tell us a little about your events and how that works in your shop?

JTB: So, it’s interesting. When I started here there were only a few bookshops in Edinburgh, there was us, Lighthouse Bookshop and The Edinburgh Bookshop… I think that’s right. And since the pandemic Toppings has opened, Portobello has opened, Argonauts opened, and Rare Birds have opened. So, before the pandemic, we had a really good choice for events but now there’s a huge competition, especially at Toppings and Portobello, who have the best events manager, a guy called Euan. He’s so good at his job. So, we do get offered [events] but we have to be picky. Again, partly because we have so few staff. Doing two events a week is a massive job for us. It’s the planning forward, plus we just don’t have much space to keep stock.

Black Sea is great. We did the launch for [Red Sands] originally, 3 or 4 years ago, which was great. So, this was the updated version of Black Sea. She’s local to the shop, she’s a customer and she’s brilliant. And it’s nice to be able to do that and get a good chair for it and create a really good event. We were also really fortunate to do Interpret, which is a translated fiction and prose and poetry magazine, run by a guy called James Appleby, who’s really passionate about it. So in that instance, we’re more like a space - we don’t plan the readers and poets who are coming. We offer up the space, make sure there’s wine out and we help promote it. Tickets will be sold through us. It’s really exciting to [host events] like that because there are people you don’t know, new authors and writers. Which is exciting. We have another poetry event coming up at the beginning of December with three poets which we’re looking forward to as well. It’s selling really well.

But since lockdown and with Toppings and Portobello we don’t get the really big events anymore. It’s not often worthwhile for us to do an event for a book, say, for a debut author, because we’re a small shop and we can maybe fit 25-30 people in. That’s packed in. Normally you’re looking at about 10 to 15. So we have to think about it. We’re good at it and we’re confident at it, and it’s really exciting to be asked to do it, but we have to think. Trying to figure out how cost-effective it is. So when we’re doing ones like the Caroline Eden event, it’s a no-brainer. She’s brilliant at talking about the book and she’s passionate about it. And Interpret as well, you know exactly what it’s going to be and that people are going to come and have a great time. But when it’s an unknown you have to be careful. 
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We don’t do anything in August at all. We used to take part in the Book Fringe which has since started up with Argonauts and Lighthouse, who do a great job, but in August we just can’t do it. We can’t do everything, as much as we’d like to.

We did an event in February/March with Jen Calleja with the book Vehicle by Prototype, which is my favourite event of the year. She’s amazing and it’s such an incredible book. That was so much fun doing that. So yeah, you get excited about stuff like that. Working with indie publishers and indie presses.

JR: It was always my favourite part of the job. But you’re right, you don’t want it to be about how many people you can get in. It should be about great conversation and about reaching the right audience. 

Do you do staff picks? Do you have a space for staff recs in-store? 

JTB: No, we don’t really have the room for that. We just do it in sections. We have the cards in one section, and depending on the time of year we have different shelves we can use to highlight the big new titles. Our shop is split into three separate rooms: we have non-fiction at the front, we have a fiction room where the fire is, and we have kids in the back. So, we’ve limited space to do extra displays. Which is a constant headache. Like, ‘This book’s great but we have nowhere to put it’. 
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​Unless it’s a big book and you get two or three, it’s very rare outside of Christmas when we’ll order more than three or four copies of a hardback, for sure. You know what it’s like, it’s the best thing when you order a book or take a punt on a book that you think is great and it sells. It’s so wonderful when it happens. Because it’s not like other retail. It’s really personal what we do. The books we have are the books we really care about. The books on our shelves, we’ve really thought about it. We think it should be on our shelves because we care about it and because we think it’s a good book. 

An interesting recommendation: this book about video game journalism that I bought in. We sold so many copies of that book because people see it and go, ‘I know someone who likes video games, I'll get that book’. You can have a really nice conversation about it. 

JR: What’s the title of that one?

JTB: Blood, Sweat and Pixels by Jason Schreier. It’s a cracking book, it’s so much fun. It’s digging into how these famous video games were made or were not made. You know, if they failed, and why they failed. So that’s fun. I don’t really read too much non-fiction, I struggle with it a little bit. Unless it’s something about cricket, video games, or professional wrestling. Which is not what we sell in the shop. It’s a little niche for us. So when you do find a book like that and for it to sell is quite exciting. 

Also, we like promoting indie presses. People like Prototype who’ve done some amazing stuff. We’ve had some really good events with them. And Fitzcarraldo and Bluemoose. You know, everyone knows Leonard and Hungry Paul and how huge a book that is. It’s the books you wouldn’t think to find here, maybe. Or, a bit strange. But when you sell them it’s the absolute best. 

JR: What are your current bestsellers, or could you give us the top few books of your year so far?

JTB: Of my year? Definitely Vehicle, Jen Calleja. I would say maybe Jungle House [by Julianne Pachico] might’ve crept in there. It’s really moving and really smart and sort of quite uneasy. It’s great. And, I don’t know… the only other one that jumps out at me, I mean, it came out in paperback this year, hardback last year, but it’s Our Wives Under The Sea by Julia Armfield. 

JR: Yes, just brilliant.

JTB: Aw, it’s just… I read that and then my wife read that book and we were just in bits. In absolute bits about that book. It’s brilliant. It’s really sad but it’s really well written. It’s funny at moments as well, about the relationship between the two main characters. It’s great. So yeah, let’s go with Vehicle, Jungle House, and Our Wives Under The Sea. My top three. Those are the ones I think a lot about, anyway.

JR: And the last question. What are your customers coming in for this Christmas so far?

JTB: It’s weird because we’re always quite different, in that there’s never just one book. There are always a few. 

So, interestingly, one of the things that’s jumped out at me so far is the Rick Ruben book, The Creative Act. It’s just sold nonstop pretty much since August, it’s flying out the door, and we can’t keep that in. In Ascension by Martin MacInnes, who used to be a bookseller in Edinburgh and we knew well, both me and Polly. Which is on the longlist for the Booker Prize. It’s been doing really well for us, as well. That’s a good one. And there’s a book by, do you know Victionary with Thames and Hudson? They’ve got a book about mushrooms [Fungal Inspiration] which we sold 5 copies of over the weekend out of nowhere. I ordered 5 for Christmas and we sold them all over the weekend, which is interesting.

JR: It’s a beautiful book. It’s kind of a weird one but it is gorgeous, isn’t it? 

JTB: Yeah, absolutely. They have another one about new folk art and one called Felinity which has funny and interesting drawings of cats in it. 

JR: I’ve not seen that one yet, but sounds great. That’s a nice eclectic mix to focus on. There was a book which came out a few years ago called Strata which I loved. Kind of really niche but beautiful and you can just flick through it. It’s like flipping through maps, I love that kind of thing. 

JTB: Yeah, they’re absolutely stunning. I always end up over-ordering with Karim. Was he your Thames and Hudson rep as well? Yeah, he knows what he’s doing. Very funny. We always get so carried away. He always brings us buns and things like that and coffee. And we’re like, ‘OK, yeah, let’s sit down eat pastries and order some books!’

JR: Oh yeah, he knows how to treat a bookseller! We’re so easy. Just cake and coffee, that’ll do it.

JTB: Ha! Yeah, man. It’ll be interesting to see what does well. We sell more fiction than non-fiction, normally. So it’ll be interesting to see what starts going well. It’s always something quite interesting. We sold last year, 20 or 30 copies of a book called Celtic Weird, which is a British Library book. There’s a book called Scotland Is Strange this year as well. It's quite a gifty book but I think that’ll probably sell well. I guess we’ll see.

If you love the sound of these indie bookseller recommendations or any of the books mentioned above then make sure to visit Golden Hare Books online or in person this Christmas!