I’ve been so busy with our community pop-up project The Book Makers that I haven’t had much of a chance to think through what we achieved. After six hectic months, The Book Makers finally closed its doors on December 18, so I’m going to do a few posts over the next few weeks to try and talk about why we did this, and what we think we achieved.
The germ of the idea came from a series of conversations I had during Covid/ Back in early 2020, as Covid took hold, I did a series of interviews on Facebook. I spoke to all sorts of people, including writers, readers and book sellers. The book sellers were the really interesting ones.
You would have thought they were the ones with the most to lose when lockdown first happened. I remember talking to The Steyning Bookshop live on Facebook, the day they closed their shop down.
This could have spelled catastrophe. But over the next few weeks I watched as bookshop after bookshop developed new strategies for getting books to their readers. The thing is, all the bookshops I know have worked hard to develop communities around them, and this may have been what gave them an edge over many other small retail businesses. During lockdown many of them worked together with local people to innovate and adapt to the new normal. The kept busy doing everything from shifting stock to digital databases so people could still brows their stock, to delivering by bicycle. One bookshop I know teamed up with their local Waitrose to deliver books alongside groceries.
Those conversations confirmed something I’d been thinking about for some time. Bookshops are extraordinary places that can teach us something special. Ten years ago, we were being told that bookshops were about to be a thing of the past.
This beautiful intersectional space has provided an incredible opportunity for connection & collaboration to our community. Thank you so much.
The Book Makers visitor
In the noughties bookshops had faced a double-whammy. The net book agreement, which guaranteed profits for them had come to an end. That ushered the way for supermarkets to get in on the game, heavily discounting book prices. And then along came Amazon…
In the face of all this disruption, bookshops collapsed. It was an awful time. Big chains like Borders simply disappeared. By 2017 there were only 868 independent bookshops left in the UK, down from almost two thousand a decade earlier.
But the interesting thing was that after that low point the numbers of bookshops started inching upwards again. Why? Because new generation of booksellers weren’t content to sit around in tweed jackets letting their stock gather dust as the world changed around them. The new bookshops connected with their local communities. They weren’t lofty aesthetes. They were people who used books to build relationships with their customers. And as I’ve said elsewhere, books are great at building communities.
The booksellers I meet run book groups. They go out into local schools and take part in literacy projects. They invite authors to events to attract new customers into their shops. They aren’t just retail businesses – they are social businesses.
Since then number of bookshops has continued to grow, slowly but surely, while almost every other sector has continued to shrink. That’s because they have figured out that to thrive they have to do more than just sell books. Bookshops are offering us a model of how we can keep our high streets alive.
Beautiful little book shop. We need more places like this in Brighton
The Book Makers customer
During lockdown I began to wonder if there was a space to experiment with this some more. When the shops opened up again, some of them wouldn’t have made it through those dark days and there would be empty shops. That was a tragedy, but empty shops would need filling. Maybe this was also an opportunity.
More of this to come in The Book Makers Part 2