Forever and another day

It might seem odd for a magazine called The Bookseller to have a dedicated issue for “booksellers”, but this week’s issue is a dedicated one for, well, booksellers, including our now-annual listing of the Bookshop Heroes, those purveyors of the written word who, when push came to shove in 2021, did a little more of both.

We cannot underestimate the importance of individual booksellers in this business. Our 23 Bookshop Heroes feature 30-year veterans, newbies, writers, radicals, one indie owner who joined from the aerospace industry, one from the navy, and even a former baker (books are easier on the wrists). Over the past year, theirs is a collective tale of defiance as shops have had to battle the Covid lockdowns, Brexit and now the vagaries of book supply. Dig a little deeper though and you’ll find tales from yesteryear too, when Kindle sales raised a question over the very future of book “shops”, as well as a glimpse into a future where social media and virtual author events provide for an experience well beyond that once imperilled physical space.

It is not easy to identify when things changed. Waterstones did not start growing again until the middle of the last decade, but once it did its performance helped shape a new narrative around physical books and in-store book sales that helped pave the way for the growth in independent bookshops just as Kindle sales faltered.

We also cannot underestimate how much has changed over a decade. When I became editor of this organ in 2012, it wasn’t obvious that our brand would last out the decade. Indie bookshop numbers were in decline, Waterstones not yet revived, the collapse of Borders still fresh in our minds, and the mood music around high streets in general was not positive. Digital, on the other hand...

In 2013, we joined with Foyles to run a series of workshops to help reimagine how its flagship could look once it relocated along Charing Cross Road. It wasn’t really about that one shop, of course, but all bookshops. The bookshop is not dead, I opined, but I’m not sure I wholly believed it.

It is not easy to identify when things changed. Waterstones did not start growing again until the middle of the last decade, but once it did its performance helped shape a new narrative around physical books and in-store book sales that helped pave the way for the growth in independent bookshops just as Kindle sales faltered.

Where once newspapers and columnists were focused on the death of the book, and the demise of those who sold them, there is now an interest in localism and the revivification of the high street. I would say bookshops began trending again around 2016, when, following the launch of the east London bookshop Libreria, I wrote about how they were “becoming central to how high streets are reinventing themselves in the 21st century, just as coffee shops are driving a renaissance in café culture”.

We don’t yet know how this plays out, but today’s booksellers have been on a crash-course in navigating an uncertain future, and rather than shrinking from the change, it is their identities that add the texture on today’s high streets. By contrast, the carbuncle that has risen up on the site of the former Foyles provides a vision for the book-less alternative.

Either way, at the heart of any bookshop building is the bookseller, and this one, as they say, is for you.