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Merseyside community bookshop named National Book Tokens Newcomer of the Year
A community bookshop in Merseyside has been named National Book Tokens Newcomer of the Year 2023.
The Book Stop is a community benefit society, owned and run by locals in the town of St Helens. It is the fourth indie to win the annual award, which is given to new bookshops based on their first full year of National Book Tokens sales and redemptions. Previous winners include The Portobello Bookshop in Edinburgh, Darling Reads in West Yorkshire, Maldon Books in Essex and The Ivybridge Bookshop in Devon.
Alex de Berry, managing director of National Book Tokens, said: “The Book Stop in St Helens is a fantastic example of the vital role that independent bookshops play in their community, and in this case the shop does not only serve its community, it is owned by it. This is local bookselling doing something unique.”
Nik Lowe, from The Book Stop, said of the win: “Our community bookshop was the brainchild of our late chairman and founder, Brian Leyland. With the closure of Wardleworths in 2019 after 40 years in the town, we were left in a dire predicament: no bookshop in the town. St Helens has one of the lowest literacy rates in the country and therefore the need to introduce reading for pleasure, especially in children, was great.”
“The Book Stop is a community benefit society, owned by the community, for the community. The support since we have opened has been unreal. We’ve hosted T M Logan, Robin Ince (twice), Lewis Hancox and a plethora of local authors and we run myriad events both in house and collaboratively with stakeholders in the town to help drive customers into the shop. We have been commended with social business awards and to receive this from National Book Tokens is simply wonderful recognition, thank you. This year is set to be an exciting year, as we look to renovate our upstairs to become a new event space, enabling a true community hub to be born from the bookshop.”
The Book Stop wins a hamper to share among their team, a trophy, and promotion to over 400,000 book lovers via National Book Tokens’ marketing platform Caboodle.
