I have one serious complaint about this book, which is that Louise Boland never took me with her on her journeys around the bookshops of Britain. Not that I have ever met her or knew anything much about the book in advance, but I can still bear a grudge, surely.
This would be the holiday of a lifetime, guaranteed to break the bank as you can’t really visit a new bookshop without buying a book… And the tour covers hundreds of bookshops – and, along the way, country houses, museums and other places of tourist interest.
Her trip north includes The Ceilidh Place in Ullapool which is also a hotel and a pub, while her most southerly stop is The Edge of the World Bookshop in Penzance. Both these shops hold regular live events (or did, before COVID) and both these towns manage to support two independents, also covered in the book. Largely the book is about independents, for obvious reasons, but there are features on the biggest Waterstones in Piccadilly, Foyles, Oxford Blackwells and Hatchards. Hatchards, owned by Waterstones, is well-known to be the oldest continually operated bookshop in the UK – but it isn’t! Step forward Whitie’s Books and Crafts in the Scottish Border town of Peebles, trading since 1791 and run by the same family since 1899.
Whitie’s doesn’t have the biggest book stock in the world, but it does also sell wool and has a haberdashery department. Maybe that’s a Scottish Border thing as Main Street Trading – a really excellent bookshop, by the way, also sells tableware and antiques. Other bookshop items around the country include globes and (oh dear, how do you stop the staff getting too enthusiastic for the product) ice-cream.
Many of the shops are in small towns or villages and operate from attractive, sometimes historic premises and this book is full of photos. I’m not sure if Bookshop Tours qualifies as a vade-mecum as it is heavy, printed on art paper to show the photos to their advantage. It’s beautiful. Not every bookshop is visited – I was hoping to see something of the Stromness Bookshop on Orkney, which orders more books published by Five Leaves than just about anywhere. And locally her tour didn’t reach our friends at Kibworth, or indeed Page 45, but she says nice things about us and The Bookcase in Lowdham. She restricts herself to saying nice things – this is a bookshop tour guide, not a critique. Her view is that we are all doing a great job. And it is largely about bookshops selling new books. Maybe another volume for second hand?
Our own little national family of shop friends is well covered, including a lot on Gays the Word, Housmans, Scarthin, Sam Read, Lighthouse, News from Nowhere, Category is Books and Portal (two new LGBT bookshops). There’s a nice photo of October Bookshop’s shop front, which looks like a bank building. It *was*, with October being the first radical bookshop to buy a bank. Capitalism replaced with anti-capitalist books. Nice.
Time to mention animals. It’s well known that indie bookshop owners often have a dog on their staff. Many are pictured, with Quayside Bookshop’s Kaiser being something of a tourist attraction in Teignmouth. However, if I ever get to Devon, the dog Astor of Astor’s Bookshop in Chagford has the most soulful eyes of any dog ever. Astor gets a full page picture. Another shop has a tortoise while Much Ado Books in Alfriston has chickens in their courtyard, though on the day of the author’s visit they had come into the bookshop itself. Maybe we could use our alley… “Would you like some eggs with that?” I can see it now.
This would be the holiday of a lifetime, guaranteed to break the bank as you can’t really visit a new bookshop without buying a book… And the tour covers hundreds of bookshops – and, along the way, country houses, museums and other places of tourist interest.