Mr b's emporium, PART 2JR: That's a great example, I think, but it's the time quite often spent from six o'clock onwards at these conferences, at the bar, or over dinner, where you get some of the most constructive conversations.
It's the bookseller-to-bookseller chats where you've got a problem or there's an issue with it, it could be anything. You've got an issue with Batchline, something's not working, Gardlink isn't working, you've got problems, anything basic, you know, and then it just takes some bookseller who's done it before to say, ‘Oh, this is how you fix that.’ And I just love those kinds of interactions. That’s what inspired all of this, really. NB: Really? JR: Yeah, yeah. It's talking to booksellers about bookseller issues, not just for industry people, I think these conversations will be interesting to those not just wanting to get into bookselling, but maybe writers, maybe other people looking at the industry in general. Building up a bit of a resource that people can tap into, which is essentially like we're sat with a pint, you know? |
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NB: It's a shame we can't do that. I mean, it's 11 in the morning, but...
JR: Well, we can follow up next time and do that instead!
NB: Yeah.
JR: So, another thing I want to talk about is a big part of Mr B’s business model. As an outsider at least, it seems as though your book subscriptions are a massive part of your business: your bibliotherapy room, your Reading Spas. A lot of that came off the back of expanding in 2008.
Can you tell us a little bit about those and how much of your business is taken up by subscriptions?
NB: Yeah, so the subscriptions and the Reading Spas are kind of two things. The origin story is really the Reading Spa, and that was after we'd only been in existence for 18 months, maybe two years. We went to The Salamander just opposite, the pub, to give another example of an idea coming out of a conversation after hours. Juliette and I, you know, used to be lawyers, so maybe this was one of those hangovers from the ex-lawyer mindset.
We were thinking, ‘What is it that people seem to be liking about our shop?’ It's very much that personal recommendation and it seemed to be that that was emphasised disproportionately. Everyone loves a personal recommendation from a bookshop.
But we realised we were organically doing that. A really high amount of our time has been spent doing this. So then we thought, ‘Well, how could you make that into something that someone can buy?’
And that was the idea of a Reading Spa, where someone buys a voucher and they can book their time to sit with us one-on-one and talk about books and have some tea and cake. And you know, just explore that reading and then they go away with a goodie bag, including some books.
JR: A great gift.
NB: So we started with that. And after two or three years, we're like, ‘Well, hang on, this only works for people in Bath’, you know, and that's when we started the idea of the subscription.
The key element that we carried through into the subscription was the bespoke element because obviously, we were not the first people to do a book subscription, but I think we were one of the first to repopularise them. But effectively, the thing that we brought to it was, ‘Let's make it more complicated for ourselves’, by getting people to fill in a questionnaire, we choose a book based on their reading taste, and send that to them every month.
And we've been doing that since 2011 in some form or another. We spend a lot of time on it. I would not have as many booksellers working for me if I didn't need there to be four Reading Spas every day, which there are. I mean, we are booked up way ahead. And if I didn't need 1000s of people to have books selected for them for the reading subscription programs.
But here's the rub. I never knew that I was accidentally creating a training program for book knowledge for booksellers. Because if you want to work at Mr B's, you have to be comfortable with the idea that you might deliver Reading Spas to customers, you know, we ask a little about people's reading tastes, but nobody's reading tastes are binary or very few.
They could be as broad as anything. Of course, we pair up the incoming reader with a bookseller who's got relevant reading experience and knowledge and taste. But if that is, let's say, crime fiction, that's not to say that the person doesn't also love nature writing.
And if you read no nature writing, then you'd better make sure you've got a couple of books that you know your colleagues love, and at least - you're not going to pretend you've read them - but you're going to say, ‘Hey, well, nature writing is not really my area as such, but I know what my colleague X would recommend at the moment, or what have you and the same goes for the subscription. So that's the great thing about it, it makes us all even more curious than the average bookseller about touchstone books in every section, which I think is a skill every bookseller should have anyway.
They should be able to walk a customer to a section, and say, ‘Here's this section, here's a section you asked to see, it's not my core area of reading but I just thought I'd point out this, and this, which my colleague is really bigging up at the moment. And I know we've had great feedback, or whatever.
And of course, having a very established subscription program during the pandemic, from a business perspective, was extremely valuable to us. Especially as we had the core infrastructure in place and knew how to operate it even under those constraints. Because we also had invested more than most bookshops, probably, having a transactional website that was very robust, because we sold so many of the vouchers for gifts, as well as some books. Having that website meant we were lucky not to have to go through the process of trying to build one, like you guys were doing, and like so many people had to do.
And again, that was another example of the industry rallying around and helping each other a lot with advice on how to resource that and do that. But yeah, we had different challenges, obviously, with the pandemic. But it did mean that those things were in place.
JR: Yeah and in a similar way, a way that I suppose is not entirely unique to Mr. B’s, but something that I found quite interesting when I was looking into the shop’s history and the things that you do outside the bookshop, is your experience with publishing.
NB: Yeah.
JR: So, beginning in 2012 with Howling Miller, that was a one-off, wasn't it? And that slowly led to Fox, Finch and Tepper. Can you give us a little intro to that and tell us what's happened since 2015 or so?
NB: Yeah, so the reason we first ever did any kind of publishing, which you're right, was Howley Miller. It was because Jamie [Byng], being the Chief Exec, he's got a grander, more lofty title now, but let's say the chief head of tech, M.D., creator. He wasn't a creator, but the guy who looked after Canongate Books and essentially changed it from a Scottish interest publisher to an international publisher of great renown. He and I had been tasked by the Booksellers Association to do a talk on collaboration. Actually, I think it came out of a previous conference where another after-hours bar conversation with various people, I was there, and Jamie was there, which eventually led to World Book Night being created. And then it came out of a brainstorming session that was one of the sessions in that. So we were talking about publisher-bookseller collaboration, and he and I always went on about it a bit, how important it was to have closer working relationships.
JR: Well, we can follow up next time and do that instead!
NB: Yeah.
JR: So, another thing I want to talk about is a big part of Mr B’s business model. As an outsider at least, it seems as though your book subscriptions are a massive part of your business: your bibliotherapy room, your Reading Spas. A lot of that came off the back of expanding in 2008.
Can you tell us a little bit about those and how much of your business is taken up by subscriptions?
NB: Yeah, so the subscriptions and the Reading Spas are kind of two things. The origin story is really the Reading Spa, and that was after we'd only been in existence for 18 months, maybe two years. We went to The Salamander just opposite, the pub, to give another example of an idea coming out of a conversation after hours. Juliette and I, you know, used to be lawyers, so maybe this was one of those hangovers from the ex-lawyer mindset.
We were thinking, ‘What is it that people seem to be liking about our shop?’ It's very much that personal recommendation and it seemed to be that that was emphasised disproportionately. Everyone loves a personal recommendation from a bookshop.
But we realised we were organically doing that. A really high amount of our time has been spent doing this. So then we thought, ‘Well, how could you make that into something that someone can buy?’
And that was the idea of a Reading Spa, where someone buys a voucher and they can book their time to sit with us one-on-one and talk about books and have some tea and cake. And you know, just explore that reading and then they go away with a goodie bag, including some books.
JR: A great gift.
NB: So we started with that. And after two or three years, we're like, ‘Well, hang on, this only works for people in Bath’, you know, and that's when we started the idea of the subscription.
The key element that we carried through into the subscription was the bespoke element because obviously, we were not the first people to do a book subscription, but I think we were one of the first to repopularise them. But effectively, the thing that we brought to it was, ‘Let's make it more complicated for ourselves’, by getting people to fill in a questionnaire, we choose a book based on their reading taste, and send that to them every month.
And we've been doing that since 2011 in some form or another. We spend a lot of time on it. I would not have as many booksellers working for me if I didn't need there to be four Reading Spas every day, which there are. I mean, we are booked up way ahead. And if I didn't need 1000s of people to have books selected for them for the reading subscription programs.
But here's the rub. I never knew that I was accidentally creating a training program for book knowledge for booksellers. Because if you want to work at Mr B's, you have to be comfortable with the idea that you might deliver Reading Spas to customers, you know, we ask a little about people's reading tastes, but nobody's reading tastes are binary or very few.
They could be as broad as anything. Of course, we pair up the incoming reader with a bookseller who's got relevant reading experience and knowledge and taste. But if that is, let's say, crime fiction, that's not to say that the person doesn't also love nature writing.
And if you read no nature writing, then you'd better make sure you've got a couple of books that you know your colleagues love, and at least - you're not going to pretend you've read them - but you're going to say, ‘Hey, well, nature writing is not really my area as such, but I know what my colleague X would recommend at the moment, or what have you and the same goes for the subscription. So that's the great thing about it, it makes us all even more curious than the average bookseller about touchstone books in every section, which I think is a skill every bookseller should have anyway.
They should be able to walk a customer to a section, and say, ‘Here's this section, here's a section you asked to see, it's not my core area of reading but I just thought I'd point out this, and this, which my colleague is really bigging up at the moment. And I know we've had great feedback, or whatever.
And of course, having a very established subscription program during the pandemic, from a business perspective, was extremely valuable to us. Especially as we had the core infrastructure in place and knew how to operate it even under those constraints. Because we also had invested more than most bookshops, probably, having a transactional website that was very robust, because we sold so many of the vouchers for gifts, as well as some books. Having that website meant we were lucky not to have to go through the process of trying to build one, like you guys were doing, and like so many people had to do.
And again, that was another example of the industry rallying around and helping each other a lot with advice on how to resource that and do that. But yeah, we had different challenges, obviously, with the pandemic. But it did mean that those things were in place.
JR: Yeah and in a similar way, a way that I suppose is not entirely unique to Mr. B’s, but something that I found quite interesting when I was looking into the shop’s history and the things that you do outside the bookshop, is your experience with publishing.
NB: Yeah.
JR: So, beginning in 2012 with Howling Miller, that was a one-off, wasn't it? And that slowly led to Fox, Finch and Tepper. Can you give us a little intro to that and tell us what's happened since 2015 or so?
NB: Yeah, so the reason we first ever did any kind of publishing, which you're right, was Howley Miller. It was because Jamie [Byng], being the Chief Exec, he's got a grander, more lofty title now, but let's say the chief head of tech, M.D., creator. He wasn't a creator, but the guy who looked after Canongate Books and essentially changed it from a Scottish interest publisher to an international publisher of great renown. He and I had been tasked by the Booksellers Association to do a talk on collaboration. Actually, I think it came out of a previous conference where another after-hours bar conversation with various people, I was there, and Jamie was there, which eventually led to World Book Night being created. And then it came out of a brainstorming session that was one of the sessions in that. So we were talking about publisher-bookseller collaboration, and he and I always went on about it a bit, how important it was to have closer working relationships.
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But it was four months out from that, and we realised we hadn't really actually tangibly collaborated on anything other than waxing on to each other. So he said, ‘Well, you always talk about how bad our cover is for The Howling Miller by Arto Paasilinna’, and he says, ‘Why don't you do your own version?’ And so we kind of roughly talked about it, worked out how that would be. This is a book that we've never held the rights to, but the model we used was, we love this book, we sold it to lots of people, we could sell it to more.
It exists in paperback, but Canongate was sitting on and not using the hardback rights. So why don't we do a one-off hardback where we create the cover, and collaborate with Canongate into making sure that the cover fits production standards and everything? And what have you, because we have no knowledge on that. We write our own blurb, our own reasons for doing it, an explanation, and then we buy basically 300 hardbacks and then sell them to our audience over the course of a year, something like that. And at the same time, we talk about it in the trade press and what have you. So it was just a collaboration project. And we got it done in like three months, because there's no market you have to worry about, we're not selling it to other bookshops, we're taking the full risk. They're just giving us a good discount and working with us and we're selling it for a while. So that was the model. We repeated it with Orion for Geoffrey Household's Rogue Mail. And we were lucky we got a Stanley Donwood, who's the street artist and kind of offbeat artist who does all the Radiohead covers and everything. He's a fan of the shop and we'd introduced him to Rogue Mail and he's obsessed with it. So he did a cover for it. And we also repeated it with Gallic Books with a brilliant French noir novel called How's the Pain by Pascal Garnier. We've done that model three times, and then it's become very occasional. I am actually about to do a fourth one, but I can't tell you yet, because it’s not quite 100% publisher confirmed. Otherwise, I would. So that's kind of a Mr. B's thing. It's not under Fox, Finch and Tepper so far. |
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Fox, Finch Tepper then came out of this thing, well, ‘Hey, okay, so we know how to do a cover now. What could possibly be so difficult about all the rest of it?’ And there are all these books we love recommending and giving out on subscriptions and selling in the shop. We can't get them anymore because they're out of print or, you know. The bit of trying to buy the rights didn't really scare us as ex-lawyers, we thought, ‘We can do that!’ And we rightly assumed you don't have to pay a huge advance for a book by an author where the book's gone out of print. No one's really fishing around for it. You're going to resurrect it. The bit that was different was how we get any kind of coverage for it. How do we get a review of it or whatever, because it's a reissue? So we had to do some work on that, and we're definitely not the best at it, but we've had some good pieces.
And so we published, and we specifically used this gap of time, because, as you said at the beginning, time is the difficult thing.
We often have so many ideas in the queue, and only so many can get up in the air. So this one got up in the air because we had a gap where we were no longer needing to spend three months of our time preparing for and delivering and dealing with the aftermath of the literature festival because that contract had a gap in it.
So we used it and went on to publish, first of all, an Australian classic called The Shiralee by D’Arcy Niland, which Penguin had briefly imported. And I remembered seeing as a kid the adaptation. Somehow we managed to get Bryan Brown, the great Australian actor, the guy who plays alongside Tom Cruise in Cocktail, we got him to give us a quote because he played the main character. We did that and then a book called Next Step in the Dance by Tim Gautreaux, a brilliant Southern American writer.
So every one of them has been really personal. We've done eight now. We did our first original piece of publishing, just after the pandemic; Iberia by Julian Sayarer, who is an example of an author we work with a lot. He's a friend of mine and he's a friend of the shop. And he had a project [which] wasn't right for his existing publisher, and so he empowered us to have a crack at editing because that's something we've never really done. It was a good one because the book is his cycle-ride across Iberia during the pandemic and it's written in journal form in a way. So as an editing project, it's a little more accessible than a 700-page novel or something like that. It's definitely one of the great current pieces of travel writing about Spain and Portugal and covers politics and so much else because he has a brilliant social conscience and brilliant insights. He's a student of politics and economics.
And then last year, we released another reissue, which was Han Suyin's Winter Love, which is a brilliant novel told of an illicit affair between two young women, one of who's married, during the Blitz in 1940s London, written by a 19-year-old in the ‘60s. And it's a superb and sort of slight novel. It's interesting, because that book's published by McNally Editions in America, and they’re also a bookseller that's turned their hand to publishing. So, yeah, in a way, it's an extension of the stuff that a bookshop can do if it loves a book, right?
It can stock it, it can display it, they can then write a review, put it on someone's favourite shelf, then, next level up maybe are you stick it in your newsletter or do a pre-order programme, or get the author to come sign. Then maybe it's an event, and it goes on this sliding scale. And maybe publishing them is, like…
JR: Is that the end? What could come next? I guess it's when you're buying the TV and film rights for a book in the future.
NB: I guess if we had a crack at making a movie, but I think that somewhere between publishing and a movie is where my willingness to try a new skill ends.
JR: It seems like every five years you're doing something different Nic, so, you know, never say never.
NB: I do love this. I do love trying. I love us trying to do things differently. And I don't really know where that came from. I love it when other bookshops do things differently. I was just looking at Backstory, you know, the bookstore in Balham, have you spoken to them on your series yet?
JR: Yes! I went down [to London] and talked to Tom. I know Tom a little bit because he's from Corbridge.
NB: Right, I didn't know. Tom is a great guy. I was lucky enough to meet him a couple of years ago when he was planning his bookshop, he came down and spent a little time with us. He was doing that with lots of bookshops. It's a super smart thing to do. Obviously, he's come from a different background, right? He's come from journalism. And I just saw in my inbox this morning from a week or so ago, I hadn’t got to it yet, the note through from Gardners about how he's now got this, like, book magazine. He's created a high-end book journal.
JR: Exactly. Volume One came out just before Christmas, so or so, yeah.
NB: I knew that, but I hadn't really figured it and then I saw that we can now stock it.
JR: Yeah, so he's gone, within less than six months, gone from self-publishing and selling it in-store and on their website, to then making it available across the UK. It's very impressive. I love that kind of ambition. I’m a huge, huge fan of theirs. But also, that kind of trajectory just makes sense when you're already in contact with these wholesalers.
NB: Yeah, and that's him doing something different and using his skill base, because he's a journalist, to do that. And it’s collaborative.
We've done a few things over the years, we've done podcasts at times, and I think about other innovative things. I think about what you guys did at Forum Books with your Silent Book Disco, I've got that wrong, right? Is that what you called it?
JR: That's it, yeah.
NB: I mean, it’s unbelievable getting a bunch of people to browse on a Saturday morning or whatever it was wearing headphones and listening to a playlist. I mean, it's absolutely unnecessary but brilliant. So I am always drawn to this, not just when we do it but when anyone does it. And it's the same when we talk about physical space. I love it when there are interesting things in physical spaces.
JR: Yeah. I guess, The Bookshop Band is a great example of the kinds of things that have started in-store and kind of gone off. And when we think about out-of-the-box thinking, I know you did a pop-up at Glastonbury one year as well, didn't you?
NB: Yeah, Glastonbury was incredible. We only did that once because that is a tough gig. I feel you need to wear a younger man's shoes than I have to do that. Because you're there on site for eight days and nights, you can't get off, you're sleeping, you know, but you're not really getting any sleep. Ironically, there was the silent disco next to us there and as you'll be aware, not silent. You can hear a lot of singing! So yeah, it was tough but amazing.
And then we do the Womad Festival every year, which is another music festival. We have a bookstore there and that has some amazing moments. That is a little more logistically plausible because you can get on off-site. Really easy. So we can put a team there. But again, it's essentially bookselling in a field, which other bookshops have done as well.
But it just adds something to your year. And great stuff, like, Michael Rosen doing a poetry reading to 1000 festival goers, because everyone just sort of drifted in and filled this arboretum, you know, and then he came over and signed in our tent afterwards. And it's incredible. And then the next morning, selling 50 copies of a hardback book about fermenting and kimchi in the only place in the world where I could sell 50 copies of that book in one hit!
JR: And in a field!
NB: Yeah, of course, you know.
JR: Like how impractical, that's such a big book!
NB: So yeah, yeah, then The Bookshop Band. They're about to go on tour, hopefully, touring around 70 bookshops for their new album.
One of the weirdest. That whole Bookshop Band thing just came out of me chatting to Ben, this musician we knew, saying, ‘Oh, I'd love to do something different in our events, I'd love there to be music involved.’ And here’s me thinking he'd come to play a cover song or something at a couple of our events, and him saying, ‘Yeah, I'm a musician, I'm not going to play a cover song, I'll write you a song inspired by the author's books!’ I was like, ‘Really?! That sounds like a lot’.
And so we published, and we specifically used this gap of time, because, as you said at the beginning, time is the difficult thing.
We often have so many ideas in the queue, and only so many can get up in the air. So this one got up in the air because we had a gap where we were no longer needing to spend three months of our time preparing for and delivering and dealing with the aftermath of the literature festival because that contract had a gap in it.
So we used it and went on to publish, first of all, an Australian classic called The Shiralee by D’Arcy Niland, which Penguin had briefly imported. And I remembered seeing as a kid the adaptation. Somehow we managed to get Bryan Brown, the great Australian actor, the guy who plays alongside Tom Cruise in Cocktail, we got him to give us a quote because he played the main character. We did that and then a book called Next Step in the Dance by Tim Gautreaux, a brilliant Southern American writer.
So every one of them has been really personal. We've done eight now. We did our first original piece of publishing, just after the pandemic; Iberia by Julian Sayarer, who is an example of an author we work with a lot. He's a friend of mine and he's a friend of the shop. And he had a project [which] wasn't right for his existing publisher, and so he empowered us to have a crack at editing because that's something we've never really done. It was a good one because the book is his cycle-ride across Iberia during the pandemic and it's written in journal form in a way. So as an editing project, it's a little more accessible than a 700-page novel or something like that. It's definitely one of the great current pieces of travel writing about Spain and Portugal and covers politics and so much else because he has a brilliant social conscience and brilliant insights. He's a student of politics and economics.
And then last year, we released another reissue, which was Han Suyin's Winter Love, which is a brilliant novel told of an illicit affair between two young women, one of who's married, during the Blitz in 1940s London, written by a 19-year-old in the ‘60s. And it's a superb and sort of slight novel. It's interesting, because that book's published by McNally Editions in America, and they’re also a bookseller that's turned their hand to publishing. So, yeah, in a way, it's an extension of the stuff that a bookshop can do if it loves a book, right?
It can stock it, it can display it, they can then write a review, put it on someone's favourite shelf, then, next level up maybe are you stick it in your newsletter or do a pre-order programme, or get the author to come sign. Then maybe it's an event, and it goes on this sliding scale. And maybe publishing them is, like…
JR: Is that the end? What could come next? I guess it's when you're buying the TV and film rights for a book in the future.
NB: I guess if we had a crack at making a movie, but I think that somewhere between publishing and a movie is where my willingness to try a new skill ends.
JR: It seems like every five years you're doing something different Nic, so, you know, never say never.
NB: I do love this. I do love trying. I love us trying to do things differently. And I don't really know where that came from. I love it when other bookshops do things differently. I was just looking at Backstory, you know, the bookstore in Balham, have you spoken to them on your series yet?
JR: Yes! I went down [to London] and talked to Tom. I know Tom a little bit because he's from Corbridge.
NB: Right, I didn't know. Tom is a great guy. I was lucky enough to meet him a couple of years ago when he was planning his bookshop, he came down and spent a little time with us. He was doing that with lots of bookshops. It's a super smart thing to do. Obviously, he's come from a different background, right? He's come from journalism. And I just saw in my inbox this morning from a week or so ago, I hadn’t got to it yet, the note through from Gardners about how he's now got this, like, book magazine. He's created a high-end book journal.
JR: Exactly. Volume One came out just before Christmas, so or so, yeah.
NB: I knew that, but I hadn't really figured it and then I saw that we can now stock it.
JR: Yeah, so he's gone, within less than six months, gone from self-publishing and selling it in-store and on their website, to then making it available across the UK. It's very impressive. I love that kind of ambition. I’m a huge, huge fan of theirs. But also, that kind of trajectory just makes sense when you're already in contact with these wholesalers.
NB: Yeah, and that's him doing something different and using his skill base, because he's a journalist, to do that. And it’s collaborative.
We've done a few things over the years, we've done podcasts at times, and I think about other innovative things. I think about what you guys did at Forum Books with your Silent Book Disco, I've got that wrong, right? Is that what you called it?
JR: That's it, yeah.
NB: I mean, it’s unbelievable getting a bunch of people to browse on a Saturday morning or whatever it was wearing headphones and listening to a playlist. I mean, it's absolutely unnecessary but brilliant. So I am always drawn to this, not just when we do it but when anyone does it. And it's the same when we talk about physical space. I love it when there are interesting things in physical spaces.
JR: Yeah. I guess, The Bookshop Band is a great example of the kinds of things that have started in-store and kind of gone off. And when we think about out-of-the-box thinking, I know you did a pop-up at Glastonbury one year as well, didn't you?
NB: Yeah, Glastonbury was incredible. We only did that once because that is a tough gig. I feel you need to wear a younger man's shoes than I have to do that. Because you're there on site for eight days and nights, you can't get off, you're sleeping, you know, but you're not really getting any sleep. Ironically, there was the silent disco next to us there and as you'll be aware, not silent. You can hear a lot of singing! So yeah, it was tough but amazing.
And then we do the Womad Festival every year, which is another music festival. We have a bookstore there and that has some amazing moments. That is a little more logistically plausible because you can get on off-site. Really easy. So we can put a team there. But again, it's essentially bookselling in a field, which other bookshops have done as well.
But it just adds something to your year. And great stuff, like, Michael Rosen doing a poetry reading to 1000 festival goers, because everyone just sort of drifted in and filled this arboretum, you know, and then he came over and signed in our tent afterwards. And it's incredible. And then the next morning, selling 50 copies of a hardback book about fermenting and kimchi in the only place in the world where I could sell 50 copies of that book in one hit!
JR: And in a field!
NB: Yeah, of course, you know.
JR: Like how impractical, that's such a big book!
NB: So yeah, yeah, then The Bookshop Band. They're about to go on tour, hopefully, touring around 70 bookshops for their new album.
One of the weirdest. That whole Bookshop Band thing just came out of me chatting to Ben, this musician we knew, saying, ‘Oh, I'd love to do something different in our events, I'd love there to be music involved.’ And here’s me thinking he'd come to play a cover song or something at a couple of our events, and him saying, ‘Yeah, I'm a musician, I'm not going to play a cover song, I'll write you a song inspired by the author's books!’ I was like, ‘Really?! That sounds like a lot’.
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And then they did it for years and years, and were our house band, then they went on to do all this stuff, and it's some of the weirdest things I've done since setting up the bookshop. Like, [being a roadie for them] in a gig at Maria's Bookshop in Durango, Colorado, this mining town in the mountains. I had to pick them up at Albuquerque Airport because we got them some gigs at the American Booksellers Association conference as part of a US tour they organised. And the night before the conference started, I flew in the night before they arrived, and then they, the two of them and their young baby, arrived with so much kit, you wouldn't believe it.
And Ben had said, ‘Yeah, just get a little high car, we'll all pile in!’ I got a big hire car knowing that he was being over-optimistic, and I immediately took it back and got an even bigger hire car, because we had a lot of stuff. And we drove up to Durango, one of the few times I've ever seen tumbleweed in action, and then they played this gig and got to introduce them to people in a small Colorado town who had no idea what was happening. JR: But you've got other connections to the States as well, though, right? I was reading somewhere, was it the Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle? NB: Yes, at the very beginning of it. We were lawyers then and we were on honeymoon in Seattle and then Alaska, and on day two of the honeymoon we went to the Elliott Bay Book Company, which was in a different location to where it is now, but they've really managed to keep their character with their move. It's just a more functional space but has the same wooden walkways character and we just loved it and we loved everything they did and it got us thinking. I can clearly remember the place. We then had a conversation on a terrace with a G&T saying, ‘What if we tried bookselling? Maybe that would be a thing to do’, because we knew we didn't want to be lawyers forever and we knew we wanted to base our work life around something that we loved, and so books were a thing. And then there was like a year of researching and resigning and, we lived in Prague at the time, moving back to the UK, and a lot of other stuff in between… But essentially, that's how it all started out. |
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We got to go back to Elliott Bay last year because we were at the American Bookselling Association conference, which was held in Seattle, and got to see it again and hang out with the manager and stuff and it was great because it's still one of the world's best bookshops. They get it, they really get customer service.
JR: That's almost 20 years now, isn't it?
NB: It is 20 years. Well, it’s 20 years in August, yeah.
JR: And you've done an awful lot in that time. I'm glad you mentioned the American Booksellers Association because that's really the last point I wanted to touch on, your involvement with the BA. Obviously, you’ve been a part of the council, President from 2018, now Executive Chair.
NB: Yeah.
JR: Can you tell us a little bit about how involved you are and what that all really means?
NB: Yeah, it's a silly title -
JR: - and obviously, how you find the time to balance the Bookshop as well. I know you've got a big team but you do have a lot of spinning plates yourself.
NB: Yeah, no, it's a difficult thing. It is the biggest challenge. And it's a growing pain thing, I would say, that’s the main thing we've done, and Juliet's been huge on this as well. Because in that time, more important than all of that, we’ve had three kids and raised them to secondary school ages.
So I think one of the most important things we've really embarked on with more structure in the last two years is making sure that anyone who comes into our business knows how to do the different things there is to do so that there's less and less knowledge sitting with me, or with other people who've been here a very long time. More effective delegation and empowerment of our team to make decisions independently is a big part of what enables me to do more. But it's still a journey that we're not fully thereon.
As I said earlier, I got involved [with the BA] really early on because no one was opening bookshops, so people were curious as to why. So I sat on panels about opening new bookshops and stuff. No one had a website, we got a teenager to build one, like our next-door neighbour, and it was transactional even in 2006. No one had that. So there was all that kind of stuff I was talking about at the beginning. I got asked to be on the Trade Council by the brilliant Jane Streeter who runs a bookshop in Nottinghamshire [The Bookcase, Lowdham] and was then the President.
I sat on the Trade Council, then became the Vice President and then the President. Those are rolling two-year things. The VP and President roles are very much in my wheelhouse, of celebrating bookshops, celebrating bookselling as a career, and empowering people to think that it is possible, and we should not be ashamed of the fact that it's possible to make a small profit from bookselling in the 21st century. And that it's important to do so, because if you don't do that you're not going to stick around and keep making jobs for people. So that was the role.
I then handed over the Presidency to Andy Rossiter who has five brilliant bookshops up along the Welsh-English borders. Literally, three days before the first lockdown, the London Book Fair was cancelled but we still held the Booksellers Association AGM because we weren't yet into meet-up cancellations or anything. And he [Andy] took it on, and I ended up being very heavily involved with him and the rest of the team in sort of working out how we support bookshops through the pandemic. Which is obviously very difficult, particularly when one of the trade wholesalers then went out of business.
But my role now is as an executive, so my role is to work with the four directors of the Booksellers Association. You have Meryl Hall who does most of what Tim Godfrey used to do. She runs the Booksellers Association. And as anyone who's ever met Meryl, she is just the biggest advocate for booksellers and the most informed and lucid and brilliant person we could have running that organisation.
Alex de Berry runs National Book Tokens, he's the Managing Director and steers that, the oldest voucher scheme in the world, I think it is. And Fraser Tanner [Managing Director] for Batch, which is hugely important to booksellers, both as a curator of a stock control system but also their payments system clearinghouse, if you want, and also for organising returns. We're lucky that they're all within the auspices of the Booksellers Association.
My job is to work with those three directors and our Finance Director and try to join the bits up, so I chair the group board, and I sit on all the divisions' boards. I have one-on-one meetings with all of the directors to help work out, you know, anything niggly that gets another sounding board, but also to spot where something's being done in one division that could usefully be connected, especially in the world where not everyone's in the office every day. And generally just try to be a point of emphasis for the whole group that everything we're doing is ultimately for the benefit of booksellers, which none of those individuals have ever forgotten, but when you're all working on separate things, sometimes it just helps. It's the bit of Tim Godfrey's old job when he did that role and Meryl's role. It's the sort of stalking the corridors bit, but the corridors are email and Zoom mostly.
And with the governance side, you know, there's lots that's needed to be done with clarifying governance, making sure we're as transparent an organisation as can possibly be for our members, and making sure members know about all the resources that are there, which is kind of my role. And it's great fun. Notionally, I have a sort of fixed number of days a month that I dedicate to that work, but it's a very uneven spread. There are seasons of board meetings and then obviously we have our AGM and things like that. But it also keeps me closely connected to all the stuff that Meryl and the President do, which is keeping an eye on the big things that are worrying bookshops. So that's kind of my role. And I've no real idea how I juggle it all.
JR: It's inspiring to hear, with such a successful and influential bookshop that you've created over these last 18 years or so, that you're still so forward-thinking, you're still looking outwards, you're looking at the industry.
But actually, as part of the BA, you've got our backs.
NB: The Booksellers Association is a remarkable organisation, it really does have everyone's backs. And I think it is a contributor to how collaborative our industry is.
I think our industry is collaborative because of all the things you talked about; we're book lovers, we're kind of somehow part of the same very broad, lowercase t ‘tribe’, you know. But I think the fact is that the Booksellers Association, even under, including, and because of, the 40-year stewardship of Tim Godfrey, who brought on people like Meryl, and Alex, and Fraser, and created that group of people. And all the people that we will see at conferences and see their names on emails, they all do get it. I don't really have a very staff-facing role, despite the fancy title, but I do get to go to all staff meetings and things.
And it's a great group of individuals, and they seem to be just like you would imagine they would be. They are getting a buzz out of bookshops. So yeah, we're really lucky to have all that work being done.
And I'm lucky to get to spend some time trying to help them organise it at the top of the chain, but then it all kind of filters through. That’s the important thing!
JR: That's almost 20 years now, isn't it?
NB: It is 20 years. Well, it’s 20 years in August, yeah.
JR: And you've done an awful lot in that time. I'm glad you mentioned the American Booksellers Association because that's really the last point I wanted to touch on, your involvement with the BA. Obviously, you’ve been a part of the council, President from 2018, now Executive Chair.
NB: Yeah.
JR: Can you tell us a little bit about how involved you are and what that all really means?
NB: Yeah, it's a silly title -
JR: - and obviously, how you find the time to balance the Bookshop as well. I know you've got a big team but you do have a lot of spinning plates yourself.
NB: Yeah, no, it's a difficult thing. It is the biggest challenge. And it's a growing pain thing, I would say, that’s the main thing we've done, and Juliet's been huge on this as well. Because in that time, more important than all of that, we’ve had three kids and raised them to secondary school ages.
So I think one of the most important things we've really embarked on with more structure in the last two years is making sure that anyone who comes into our business knows how to do the different things there is to do so that there's less and less knowledge sitting with me, or with other people who've been here a very long time. More effective delegation and empowerment of our team to make decisions independently is a big part of what enables me to do more. But it's still a journey that we're not fully thereon.
As I said earlier, I got involved [with the BA] really early on because no one was opening bookshops, so people were curious as to why. So I sat on panels about opening new bookshops and stuff. No one had a website, we got a teenager to build one, like our next-door neighbour, and it was transactional even in 2006. No one had that. So there was all that kind of stuff I was talking about at the beginning. I got asked to be on the Trade Council by the brilliant Jane Streeter who runs a bookshop in Nottinghamshire [The Bookcase, Lowdham] and was then the President.
I sat on the Trade Council, then became the Vice President and then the President. Those are rolling two-year things. The VP and President roles are very much in my wheelhouse, of celebrating bookshops, celebrating bookselling as a career, and empowering people to think that it is possible, and we should not be ashamed of the fact that it's possible to make a small profit from bookselling in the 21st century. And that it's important to do so, because if you don't do that you're not going to stick around and keep making jobs for people. So that was the role.
I then handed over the Presidency to Andy Rossiter who has five brilliant bookshops up along the Welsh-English borders. Literally, three days before the first lockdown, the London Book Fair was cancelled but we still held the Booksellers Association AGM because we weren't yet into meet-up cancellations or anything. And he [Andy] took it on, and I ended up being very heavily involved with him and the rest of the team in sort of working out how we support bookshops through the pandemic. Which is obviously very difficult, particularly when one of the trade wholesalers then went out of business.
But my role now is as an executive, so my role is to work with the four directors of the Booksellers Association. You have Meryl Hall who does most of what Tim Godfrey used to do. She runs the Booksellers Association. And as anyone who's ever met Meryl, she is just the biggest advocate for booksellers and the most informed and lucid and brilliant person we could have running that organisation.
Alex de Berry runs National Book Tokens, he's the Managing Director and steers that, the oldest voucher scheme in the world, I think it is. And Fraser Tanner [Managing Director] for Batch, which is hugely important to booksellers, both as a curator of a stock control system but also their payments system clearinghouse, if you want, and also for organising returns. We're lucky that they're all within the auspices of the Booksellers Association.
My job is to work with those three directors and our Finance Director and try to join the bits up, so I chair the group board, and I sit on all the divisions' boards. I have one-on-one meetings with all of the directors to help work out, you know, anything niggly that gets another sounding board, but also to spot where something's being done in one division that could usefully be connected, especially in the world where not everyone's in the office every day. And generally just try to be a point of emphasis for the whole group that everything we're doing is ultimately for the benefit of booksellers, which none of those individuals have ever forgotten, but when you're all working on separate things, sometimes it just helps. It's the bit of Tim Godfrey's old job when he did that role and Meryl's role. It's the sort of stalking the corridors bit, but the corridors are email and Zoom mostly.
And with the governance side, you know, there's lots that's needed to be done with clarifying governance, making sure we're as transparent an organisation as can possibly be for our members, and making sure members know about all the resources that are there, which is kind of my role. And it's great fun. Notionally, I have a sort of fixed number of days a month that I dedicate to that work, but it's a very uneven spread. There are seasons of board meetings and then obviously we have our AGM and things like that. But it also keeps me closely connected to all the stuff that Meryl and the President do, which is keeping an eye on the big things that are worrying bookshops. So that's kind of my role. And I've no real idea how I juggle it all.
JR: It's inspiring to hear, with such a successful and influential bookshop that you've created over these last 18 years or so, that you're still so forward-thinking, you're still looking outwards, you're looking at the industry.
But actually, as part of the BA, you've got our backs.
NB: The Booksellers Association is a remarkable organisation, it really does have everyone's backs. And I think it is a contributor to how collaborative our industry is.
I think our industry is collaborative because of all the things you talked about; we're book lovers, we're kind of somehow part of the same very broad, lowercase t ‘tribe’, you know. But I think the fact is that the Booksellers Association, even under, including, and because of, the 40-year stewardship of Tim Godfrey, who brought on people like Meryl, and Alex, and Fraser, and created that group of people. And all the people that we will see at conferences and see their names on emails, they all do get it. I don't really have a very staff-facing role, despite the fancy title, but I do get to go to all staff meetings and things.
And it's a great group of individuals, and they seem to be just like you would imagine they would be. They are getting a buzz out of bookshops. So yeah, we're really lucky to have all that work being done.
And I'm lucky to get to spend some time trying to help them organise it at the top of the chain, but then it all kind of filters through. That’s the important thing!
