Livrarias Independentes ( independent bookshops)
Artigo publicado pelo jornal The Guardian
Is there any future for independent bookshops? Earlier this month, six went out of business in just one week. Those that still survive know they can never match the huge discounts offered by Amazon, supermarkets and chains such as Waterstone's. Yet when Stephen Moss toured the country to visit this 'dying breed', he found a group convinced it can fight back.
The novelist Susan Hill infuriated independent booksellers earlier this year by arguing that some small shops don't deserve to survive. She had visited three - one that was being run down, one run by a man who clearly knew nothing about bookselling, the third owned by a "witch" who appeared to hate selling books. "Whenever I hear people shouting, 'Save the village store', I wonder if they have been in one lately," Hill wrote. "And the same goes for bookshops."
I have. Over the past few weeks I have talked to dozens of independent bookshop owners, from husband-and-wife outfits in Brighton to radical cooperatives in Liverpool. I wanted to test the conventional wisdom that independents are in trouble, being remorselessly squeezed by the chains, the supermarkets and Amazon, each seeking to undercut the others on price. The Bookseller trade magazine recently reported that six independents had closed in a single week.
With the behemoths able to secure huge discounts through bulk-buying, bestselling titles are now routinely sold at half their cover price, sometimes less. One independent I talked to reported finding the most recent Harry Potter (list price £16.99) at an absurd £2.99 in the local supermarket. Online, Amazon was yesterday offering it at £4.99. How does the small shop, which once looked forward eagerly to the annual Potter bonanza, compete with that? Are independents destined to follow second-hand bookshops, which have been all but obliterated by the internet, into oblivion?
My trawl started badly. The first shop I tried to contact, Secession Books in Bath, had just gone out of business. There was a sad little note on its web page: "We wish to thank our patrons for their custom over the past year and a half. Our shop has been a rewarding and exciting venture, but, though growing, it has not earned enough money to support us and our hopes for a family ... We thank you for all your patience and understanding. With fondest regards, James and Hannah."
I phoned James and Hannah. They agreed to meet and talk about the reasons for the failure of the shop, but pulled out at the last moment, the wound presumably still too raw. But others in the business had a ready explanation: they had opened in the centre of Bath, round the corner from a large and very good Waterstone's. They had the worst of all worlds - rents would be high and they would face immediate competition from a shop carrying much more stock and offering discounted prices on the most popular lines. Small isn't always beautiful.
Their web page thoughtfully referred bookbuyers to another independent in Bath - the Oldfield Park Bookshop. It's owned by Harry Wainwright, who used to be Waterstone's manager in the south-west. Bored by admin and disappointed that Waterstone's had become more centralised under its new owners HMV, he started his own shop in 2002 and quickly found a niche. Wainwright was one of four former senior Waterstone's staff I met on my tour - people who in the 1980s had bought into the Waterstone's philosophy of decentralised buying and personal service. They are now using what they learned then - that a bookshop should reflect its locality precisely and serve each book-buyer personally - to fight the store that nurtured them.
Within five minutes of meeting Wainwright, you realise what it takes for an independent to succeed. First, the owner needs bags of experience. Starting on a whim - "I'm tired of my job in industrial chemistry and have always loved books" - is generally a recipe for disaster. Second, find the right location: Oldfield Park is a brilliant spot, a gentrifying suburb with lots of young professionals (big book buyers) and aspirational families (buyers of big books). The place is big and busy enough to support a well-run local bookshop, but not so attractive that Ottakar's, say, is going to come calling. It can be done.
"Don't pity us," Valerie Glencross of the Sevenoaks Bookshop instructs me. She argues that the bigger the chains get, the greater the opportunity for independents. She turns predictions of the demise of stand-alone booksellers on their head: the chains are not eating the independents, she says, but eating each other. Tesco's pile-'em-high, sell-'em-cheap move into bookselling has undermined Waterstone's and Ottakar's, which have felt obliged to join the price war. All the chains are struggling and rationalisation is under way, with Books etc (part of Borders) disappearing and Ottakar's up for sale. Waterstone's is keen to buy Ottakar's, but it, too, has become a bid target. With too many outlets, vicious discounting and no clear strategy - what is the point of virtually giving books away? - it is arguably not the independents that are in flux but the chains.
Most independents refuse to discount. They realise it's a battle they could never win. Instead, they have to compete on service, ambience, range of stock, the quality of their coffee and, above all, the sense that they are an integral part of the local community. I asked each shopowner how many regular customers they had, and was surprised by the low numbers some quoted: 250 loyalists might be enough to support a shop, people who come to signings and talks, buy a book once a fortnight and buy from the shop even when they could get what they want cheaper somewhere else. They are (forgive the jargon) "stakeholders" in the shop: no independent can exist without them. At the Open Book in Richmond, Surrey, one of these stakeholders was in residence as I browsed. Noticing that a book was on the wrong shelf, he asked the owner if she would mind him replacing it.
The shop was so delightful that I ended up buying a book I didn't especially want. It was expensive, too, but I had some catching up to do. There's a small independent bookshop close to the Guardian, which, of course, had to be visited for this survey. "I see you've moved," was my opening gambit when I met the owner. The shop used to be across the road from its present location. "Yes, three years ago," came the reply. Gulp. So much for supporting your local independent.
London Review Bookshop
14 Bury Place, Bloomsbury, London WC1
Andrew Stilwell, who manages the LRB bookshop opposite the British Museum, is a very good bookseller. I know this because, ahead of my arrival, he had fished out a book relevant to this article - Laura J Miller's Reluctant Capitalists: Bookselling and the Culture of Consumption - and sold it to me for £22.50.
He is also a very experienced bookseller, having been one of the first people to join Waterstone's when it was launched in 1982. Stilwell ran the Cheltenham branch for 10 years before becoming disillusioned - "I was no longer bookselling, I was penpushing" - and tried his hand at secondhand bookselling. Four years ago, he came to run the LRB Bookshop.
He doesn't, though, write the chains off completely. "There is a huge disparity in quality among chain bookshops," he says. "The best offer a very good service but others don't, because the people who are at the face of serving the customer don't necessarily feel they're valued and the people running the chains tend not to have a history of bookselling. You need to engage with customers and be passionate about the things you're selling, and that's not always the case in chain bookshops."
But it certainly is the case here, in this austere but beautiful 20,000-title book heaven. "We tried to design the shop to look modern but stylish," says Stilwell. "We don't want the leather-sofa, clubby feel. I think the books themselves are the design. We don't have many faceouts [books displayed to show the cover, rather than the spine] on the shelves; in a way, we can't afford to becausewe try to stock as many titles as possible. The displays in the window and on the tables are very eccentric - the themes are very loose and people seem to like the quirkiness."
He admits that there is a copy of Dan Brown lurking behind the counter in case an American tourist wanders in from the British Museum, but that is not the sort of book they seek to sell. "We're not trying to be elitist," he says, "but we only have a certain amount of space and what we're trying to do is stock the books that readers of the LRB are likely to find interesting." I will treasure my copy of Reluctant Capitalists by Laura J Miller, assistant professor of sociology at Brandeis University, with its 229 pages of text and 67 pages of notes.
News From Nowhere
96 Bold Street, Liverpool
News From Nowhere is a remarkable bookshop. In a conformist age, this is about as nonconformist as it gets: a radical bookshop in the centre of Liverpool run by a five-woman cooperative committed to selling books that "help people move themselves and the world forward". They don't stock any Dan Brown (though they will order it if you absolutely must have a copy) and one of the staff is called Rhona McSporran. Brilliant.
The shop is large, beautiful and intriguingly stocked. "Somebody was in the other day and said they'd never seen such an amazing collection of black-American books," says Mandy Vere, (above, left) who has been at the shop almost from its launch in 1974. "People come in and, whatever their interest is, they'll find some depth to our stock compared with a lot of general bookshops."
The children's section demonstrates the difference in philosophy between News From Nowhere and most shops. "We carry a vast range of books that we would say reflect the reality of the world," says Vere. "We source things to different issues - our bodies, anti-racism, feelings, disabilities, families, world cultures. The vast majority of bookshops don't show children the world the way it is. Disabled children and parents exist everywhere, and yet it's very hard to find their lives reflected in literature."
All this could be ponderous and didactic, but Vere laughs frequently - she calls herself the shop's "dinosaur", she's been here so long - and has an infectious enthusiasm. She brings along a younger colleague, Kate Simmons, on the tour of the shelves, but Simmons can barely get a word in, so much does Vere live the shop.
I quibble at all the add-ons - world music CDs, meditation tapes, fairtrade products - but Vere says they are an essential part of the shop's philosophy. "We're not just a bookshop. We're an information centre and a hub of activity. To us, meditation CDs tie in with inner change; fairtrade crafts tie in with outer change, and the bookshop is about a combination of inner and outer change." I only spent an hour in the shop, and I already felt changed. Slightly.
Broadway Bookshop
6 Broadway Market, Hackney, London E8
Jane Howe cheered me up. She opened the Broadway Bookshop in Hackney last November, and it's the sort of place that captivates you as soon as you walk through the door. She says it's going "fantastically", though admits she doesn't know how fantastically because her accountant is just calculating the small matters of turnover and profit. She is definitely a booklover rather than a bean-counter, but you sense her love is so intense that the beans will look after themselves.
Howe had been in bookselling, at three different shops, for 15 years, and last year decided to take the plunge and set up on her own. "It was now or never," she says. She was planning to open a shop in fashionable Brick Lane in the East End, but then discovered Broadway Market. "The moment I saw this shop and the market, I knew it was better than Brick Lane for a bookshop because it's a community street. I came and sat in the pubs and the bars for a few evenings to see what kind of people lived here, and they were all between 25 and 35. I would listen to their conversations and they would all talk about making films or making dresses and about writing, so I sussed my clientele."
That clientele is highly literate and has a taste for the recherché, but doesn't necessarily have much money. "I don't stock big coffee-table books," says Howe, "because nobody would buy them, and I don't stock many art books because they're actually artists rather than people who want a book with nice pictures on the table." What she does stock is stuff she likes herself. "Everything in my shop I want to read myself. Obviously you don't have time to read them all, but I've got a pretty good idea of what's in most of them. It's what I want to read and what I think they want to read. Mainly those two things tally. I don't often get asked for things that I wouldn't want to stock."
The Da Vinci Code? "I do stock it because I thought I'm not going to be so snobby as to not stock The Da Vinci Code. A customer came in in our second week and said, 'Have you got The Da Vinci Code?' and I said, 'Yes I have.' He said, 'I'm shocked. I was just testing you, and I'm shocked.'"
Wenlock Books
12 High Street, Much Wenlock, Shropshire
Earlier this month, Wenlock Books was named Independent Bookseller of the Year at the Booksellers Association conference - recognition of the effort and imagination that Anna Dreda has put into the shop in the two and half years she has owned it. Not that it was a bad bookshop before - Dreda had worked there for 12 years - but when she took over she could add the touches that swayed the judges: a broader range of stock (both new and second-hand); improved decor; free tea, coffee and cake. But couldn't the coffee be a nice little earner? "If I invite people into my home, I don't expect them to pay," she says.
Much Wenlock is a market town. The bookshop occupies a beautiful 15th-century building in the middle of a medieval high street. It sells new books, cards and CDs on the ground floor, second-hand books on the floor above. There are branches of Waterstone's in nearby Telford and Shrewsbury, but Dreda says local buyers are loyal. "People are very aware of the political ramifications of shopping in a shop like this," she says. "If you shop at an independent in a small market town, you are bringing trade to that town and enabling it to survive. People also realise the social importance of having a bookshop in a small town. It does more than sell books. Selling books pays the rates, but it's all the other things that make it special. We know our customers by name, we are part of their lives."
She looks to the future with confidence. "I see no point in being despondent. Nobody owes us a living. The book trade is changing and we have to change with it. There are marvellous opportunities around for independents if we have the energy to jump for them."
Daunt Books
83-84 Marylebone High Street, London W1
James Daunt is the beau ideal of independent booksellers. A former banker, he set up his elegant shop in Marylebone High Street in 1990 - just in time for the recession - and has been so successful that three other Daunt's branches have followed in other parts of London. A privately owned chain, then, but no one calls it that. Each Daunt's retains an identity; the flagship sails proudly on; and, most important of all, the 28- strong staff who rotate around the four stores are what Daunt calls "properly paid" and committed to the company. This, presumably, is how Waterstone's was in the Devonian period.
The Daunt's mission keeps coming back to staffing. "We treat bookselling as a proper career, and nobody seems to leave," says Daunt. "We offer motivated, interested, intelligent, responsive staff, which isn't always the case in bookshops." But why rotate staff, rather than leave them to cultivate one shop? "There's always the great danger as a shopkeeper of turning into Basil Fawlty," he explains. "You go mad and start hating your customers and shouting at them - or loving some and disliking others."
Daunt, who refuses to discount or have a sticker of any sort on a book, dismisses the argument that discounting will kill off independents. "Bookselling has been battered by price-cutting," he argues, "but independents have probably suffered less than the chains themselves."
John Sandoe Books
10 Blacklands Terrace, Chelsea, London SW3
An evening at John Sandoe Books - it's Wednesday and late-night opening - convinces you that independents can work. There's a steady stream of customers in the tiny shop; they treat coowner John de Falbe as a friend; best of all, they're spending lots of money. The shop has been here, in a small, mainly residential road just off the King's Road, since 1957. De Falbe, who also writes novels, took over the shop with two partners when Sandoe retired in 1989. There's a Waterstone's close by in Sloane Square, but David appears to be having no difficulty fending off Goliath.
It helps that Sandoe's stock is a good deal more idiosyncratic than Waterstone's. "People often think we're specialised because they see funny books around," says De Falbe. He picks up an encyclopedia of the Arctic and a book on some esoteric branch of Turkish architecture. "We've sold 29 copies of that."
"We have a lot of regular customers who've been coming for a long time," he explains, "and once you know something about a person's reading habits and they trust you, it's a bit like a relationship with a GP. You have a very narrow knowledge of them, but it's quite deep. Sometimes you know much more about what they read than their spouse, and often people's reading habits are quite an intimate part of them."
De Falbe says he will stock books with specific customers in mind, and reckons that's a way of ensuring you have an interesting, diverse stock. "In the end, the books that we want to give house room to are the ones we care about, the ones that we know something about. You think, 'I know why I've got that on the shelves.' You know why it's here."
Bailey Hill Bookshop
Fore Street, Castle Cary, Somerset
Lynn Johnston was Ottakared. She used to have a bookshop in Wells in Somerset - small, friendly, popular, the usual stuff. But evidently not popular enough, because when Ottakar's moved in, profits plunged and she was forced to close. Now she's starting all over again down the road in Ottakar-less Castle Cary."
In the end, I really couldn't fight the pricecutting," she explains. "As well as Ottakar's, I was facing Smiths and Tesco. It turned me into a nervous wreck. It's just too small a market. I tried to compete and it cost me a lot of money." The Canadian-born Johnston, who opened in Wells in 1989, laments the end of the net book agreement [which barred discounting] in the mid-1990s. "Before the net book agreement was broken I would sell a hundred Delia Smiths," she says. "As soon as it ended, just forget all that. Michael Palin - I couldn't keep enough in stock. It was easy money."
The Castle Cary shop, which she took over 18 months ago and is sprucing up, sells new and second-hand books, CDs, DVDs and cards. "I have a foot in everything I can have a foot in," she says. "We're doing second-hand and putting them on the internet. You have to have eyes in the back of your head to run a bookshop at the moment."
Metropolitan Books
49 Exmouth Market, Clerkenwell, London EC1
Phil Griffiths is a one-man band. His shop is small, it turns over about £100,000 a year, he more or less is the staff. Our conversation is punctuated by him having to serve customers, chat to passers-by and say hello to the postman. The shop is close to the Guardian's offices - he says the Guardian's proposed move to King's Cross in a couple of years or so could have so severe an effect on his business that he may have to relocate too.
Before he started the shop eight years ago, he worked for an independent in Islington. At that time, in the mid-1990s, there were four independents clustered around Islington Green; then Waterstone's arrived, closely followed by Borders. All the independents have gone. Griffiths found refuge a mile or so away from the two chains.
"It's becoming more of a niche market, but there is still room for independents," he says. "If anything, it's starting to feel as if there is a bit of a backlash. People are bored with seeing the same selection of books on display in all the chain windows. Everywhere seems to have a Borders or Waterstone's or Ottakar's now. It feels uniform, plastic; you could almost be anywhere, on any major high street.
"It's felt harder in the past three years, but now it seems to be levelling out and the potential is there for it to increase again. It may be slightly easier to have an independent bookshop than it was five years ago. Waterstone's aren't really performing at all now. They seem to be very drab all of a sudden. If there's a takeover and they give the branches back some of the autonomy they used to have, maybe that will change. At the moment, Waterstone's feels like a book stockist rather than a bookseller."
Griffiths says he makes a virtue of having a small shop. "When you have limited space, you don't feel obliged to stock everything," he explains. "A lot of the stuff that I wouldn't read, I wouldn't necessarily stock." It is the antithesis of central buying. What you see in a shop like this is what the owner would have on his shelves at home - if he had £50,000 to spare."
Heywood Hill Bookshop
10 Curzon Street, London W1
Heywood Hill Bookshop in Mayfair is the only store I visited with a blue plaque over the doorway. The novelist Nancy Mitford ran it during the war while the founder, Heywood Hill, was in the army, and when you step into the dark, cluttered shop it feels like it's 1952.
The shop is run by John Saumarez Smith, who joined straight from Cambridge in 1965 and never quite left. Unusually, the shop sells new, second-hand and antiquarian books. "Most bookshops tend to specialise now," admits Saumarez Smith, "and it is extremely difficult to keep fingers on the pulses of all three areas. But I believe within these four walls it is a good thing to do all three, because we have to concentrate on quality and the personal touch."
Heywood Hill's touch is more personal than most. At first sight the arrangement of the books is baffling, though Saumarez Smith says you get the hang of it after about the third visit. Among various unanswered questions is why Trollope and Henry James get a section to themselves. Browsers and book addicts will probably adore it; others may balk at the idiosyncratic layout and lack of labelling. "We like to think if you want a book of Shelley's poems, we can lay our hands on it," says Saumarez Smith reassuringly.
The shop is famous for cataloguing and selling the libraries of the great and the good (usually after their deaths). Recent sales include the libraries of Enoch Powell, Hugh Trevor-Roper and James Lees-Milne; the room in which Saumarez Smith explains the shop's complex history to me includes several boxes of books that belonged to Edward Heath, their next project.
Heywood Hill is unique; ditto John Saumarez Smith; the shop is owned by the Duke of Devonshire and a consortium of long-time customers; there are no three-for-two offers. It is entirely out of synch with the modern world - which may ensure its survival or threaten its future.
City Books
23 Western Road, Brighton
Paul Sweetman, who co-owns City Books with his wife Inge, may be the exception that proves the rule. He is the independent who does discount. "Competition is horrendous here," he explains. "It's probably one of the toughest places in the country. The first Borders in Europe opened in Brighton and, in response to that, Waterstone's increased their space to five floors. And Sussex Stationers [a chain that discounts ferociously] are based in Brighton and have six branches here, including a couple of their biggest ones." Sweetman's response has been to join the price war.
But with smart bombs. His shop puts 50 or 60 titles on special offer, and tries not to duplicate what is being discounted by the chains. "We don't blindly whack the price of everything," he says. "We wouldn't reduce the price of a highquality book that might be bought as a gift. People don't buy a cut-price book for their best friend's wedding. The Sussex Stationers approach is just to stick a label on everything. That's ludicrous. We can't discount deeply but we can pick the books that customers want."
The policy, anathema to booksellers such as James Daunt and most other independents, seems to be working. City Books celebrates its 21st birthday next year. Sweetman recalls how another very good local independent, Read All About It, which refused to discount, was forced out of business by the proximity of a Sussex Stationers.
City Books' other weapon is author events. "We do an enormous number of events that we hold in a local theatre called the Old Market," says Sweetman. "We've pretty well cornered the events market and really enjoy doing them." The bookshop also sponsors the Brighton festival. "We're not shrinking violets," he says. "We like to take a few gambles. It doesn't have to come off every time. There's a danger that independents can be too cautious and conservative."
Oldfield Park Bookshop
43 Moorland Road, Bath
Harry Wainwright, who started the Oldfield Park Bookshop in 2002, is an old Waterstone's hand. "I joined in the champagne days of 1988," he recalls. "There were 20 shops and Tim [Waterstone] knew everybody by name." Wainwright worked first in Dublin, then in the large Bath Waterstone's, which he managed from 1990-95 before getting a job in head office managing all the stores in the south-west of England.
He quit Waterstone's in October 2001. "It was a crossroads," he says. "I'd reached a point where you think it's down to priorities. Waterstone's had become very centralised and I didn't think it was going to change back, but did I want to work for another organisation? I couldn't leave the book trade - I just loved bookselling - so I decided to strike out on my own."
Why Oldfield Park, a suburb a mile south of the centre of Bath? "City centres are mostly volume-driven now unless you've got something that's a real niche," he explains. "Market towns made me nervous because you have to think, 'How do head offices see the world?' They see it in terms of cities and market towns, whereas Waterstone's would never think of opening somewhere like this. But there's a busy passing trade and a lot of young professional people live here, which is our core market."
Wainwright toyed with discounting a couple of years ago but gave up when he realised that a Nigella Lawson book he had bought at a 50% discount - high for an independent, which usually gets 35-40% - was being offered for less than that in supermarkets. Now it's all about quality of service - "even at Christmas we make sure we can spend 20 minutes with a customer" - and building up a nexus of local buyer-supporters.
"About half of our turnover comes from a very small group of customers," he says, "to whom I am undyingly loyal. They'll be a couple of hundred, many of whom I know by name. They're really buying into what we are trying to do. It's an old-fashioned kind of retailing - people who like to be known. A lot of them become friends and you take an interest in each other's lives.
Frontline Books
73 Humberstone Gate, Leicester
Shani Lee started selling books three years ago. Having been involved in personnel management and then community regeneration, she says she was looking for a third career, though the shop is not yet doing so well that she can abandon the others - she has to run training courses to help fund the bookselling.
Frontline is a leftwing bookshop based in the Secular Hall in Leicester, a traditional focal point for radicals and free-thinkers. The shop is tiny - 200sq ft - and carries only 1,600 titles, though, like all the independents, it can whistle up almost any book in print in 24 hours. But Lee is hoping to get a grant, as part of the regeneration of the area, to create a shop five times larger than that.
"We won't be doing three-for-two offers or the bestselling stuff," she says. "We'll be much more LRB-style and linked in with writers groups. I see this space as a hub for writers and for readers, for people who enjoy reading and discussing ideas." Her dream depends on the regeneration of the area into a cultural hotspot. At the moment, it resembles a bus park, but a £48m performing arts venue, due to open in 2008, could trigger a renaissance. "It will be like a village on the east side of the city centre," says Lee hopefully.
You sense, though, that the next couple of years - the bus park period - could be testing. "I think I'll survive because we're planning for the future," she says. "We are building a presence and a profile for the bookshop. We knew we'd have these problems at the beginning. Also, I needed time to learn about bookselling, and I've learned a lot."
The Bookshop
1d Calton Avenue, Dulwich Village, London SE21
Hazel Broadfoot and Julian Toland, who co-own the Dulwich Bookshop, make it all look so easy. The shop, which they bought 10 years ago, is popular, profitable and often held up as a model independent. Recently, they bought a second shop in Wandsworth and are now trying to work their magic there. Except, the way they tell it, it's not magic; it's common sense: carry a wide and interesting range of stock; keep it under control; offer excellent service.
It helps that they are steeped in books. "It's all I've ever done, really, for 35 years," says Toland. Both were directors of Waterstone's before leaving almost simultaneously in the 1990s and, soon after, agreeing over lunch to start their own shop. But tyros beware - it really isn't as simple as it appears. "Lots of people come into the shop and say, 'I'm retiring, I'd like to start a bookshop,'" cautions Broadfoot, "and you think, 'Don't! Don't do it,' because if you don't know what you're doing, you can get it so wrong."
But if you do know what you're doing - and lots of the Waterstone's diaspora clearly do - then there is an opportunity. Toland cites the improvement in the supply chain and the speed at which orders can be fulfilled. Broadfoot argues - and this will amaze some independents - that even the end of the net book agreement had a silver lining. "We bought this shop just as the net book agreement was going," she recalls, "and at first we thought, 'Oh my God, this is a disaster.' But it wasn't and we finished up making better margins because publishers will negotiate on an individual basis now. We make the sort of margins that Waterstone's used to make when they had six shops, so if your cost base is right and your location is right, you ought to be able to do really well."
Foyle's
113-119 Charing Cross Road, London WC2
Foyle's is not your average independent. It carries 221,000 titles and turns over £14m a year, for a start. It also has another outlet at the Royal Festival Hall on London's South Bank, and is about to open two more at Hampton Court Palace and the Tower of London. But don't use the C-word anywhere near commercial director Vivienne Wordley, who calls the shop "fiercely independent" and says, "If we don't differentiate ourselves from the chains, we have failed."
"We consciously set out to be different," she says. "We carry more books, do a lot of backlist promotion, and won't sell things at half-price and end up losing money." Foyle's isdoing a threefor- two at the moment - on Loeb's Classics! And Seamus Heaney's District and Circle is book of the month. "We want to put unusual things in front of the customer," says Wordley. "We'll show the Richard and Judy titles, because people will expect them, but they won't dominate the store."
The shop, in the days when it was run by the family matriarch Christina Foyle, was famous for its anarchic organisation. When I ask Wordley whether she worked for it then, she sounds horrified. "Of course not," she says. "What do you think I am, a masochist?" In the past five years, with an investment of £4m, Foyle's has sought to improve both its appearance and its efficiency - you no longer have to queue three times to buy a book. But, still family-owned, it doesn't want to lose all its idiosyncrasy. "We mustn't become bland and anodyne," says Wordley. "Shopping here should be fun. That why we have a piranha tank in the kids' department. We thought that would be better than a fluffy toy."
"We consciously set out to be different," she says. "We carry more books, do a lot of backlist promotion, and won't sell things at half-price and end up losing money." Foyle's isdoing a threefor- two at the moment - on Loeb's Classics! And Seamus Heaney's District and Circle is book of the month. "We want to put unusual things in front of the customer," says Wordley. "We'll show the Richard and Judy titles, because people will expect them, but they won't dominate the store."
The shop, in the days when it was run by the family matriarch Christina Foyle, was famous for its anarchic organisation. When I ask Wordley whether she worked for it then, she sounds horrified. "Of course not," she says. "What do you think I am, a masochist?" In the past five years, with an investment of £4m, Foyle's has sought to improve both its appearance and its efficiency - you no longer have to queue three times to buy a book. But, still family-owned, it doesn't want to lose all its idiosyncrasy. "We mustn't become bland and anodyne," says Wordley. "Shopping here should be fun. That why we have a piranha tank in the kids' department. We thought that would be better than a fluffy toy."
Simply Books
228 Moss Lane, Bramhall, Cheshire
The centre of Manchester has no independent bookshops - or none I could find. High rents and chain dominance has forced them out. Yet Bramhall, a satellite town (residents prefer to say village) to the south of the city has two: Simply Books, which opened four years ago, and Bramhall Village Bookshop, which has been here for 37. One senses a hint of tension between the two.
Simply Books was set up by Andrew Cant and Sue Steel when they failed to buy the Village Bookshop. The shop is light, airy, modern, welcoming. A strong children's section; a coffee bar; a purpose-designed events space upstairs. Cant, former assistant director of education in Manchester, and Steel, a former school head, have given up big jobs to start this shop, and their energy and commitment are palpable, exhausting even.
But why did they give up two thumping salaries to start so tricky a business? "It was one of those mad moments really," says Steel. "It was Christmas Eve, 2001. You have those usual conversations around Christmas about what would you have done if you could have done anything at all. We were sitting there, glass of wine in hand, and Andrew said to me, 'I would have had a bookshop, I would love to have done that.' I told him the Village Bookshop was up for sale and he put in an offer." The bid failed but the idea had taken root, and four years later here they are, salary-less but enjoying life.
"I'd had enough of working in education," says Cant. "It's a hothouse and not the sort of place where you want to spend your whole life. This is a bit more creative and you've got the autonomy to make decisions." Steel says she was still enjoying teaching, but thought that Cant would need support. "I said, 'If you do this on your own, you'll never get out of the shop and you'll end up as one of those people in cardigans going mad.' So we had another big weekend, the outcome of which was that I came in too. We thought, 'We've really got to make a go of it now because we've given up everything.'" Never start a bookshop on a whim - or as a result of a "What-is-the-meaning-of-life?" discussion on Christmas Eve - is usually sound advice. But if anyone can overturn that logic, Cant and Steel can.
