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Bookshop Spotlight: Five Leaves Bookshop
With 100-plus events held in-store each year and a potential upsize on the horizon, Nottingham-based indie Five Leaves is going from strength to strength.
14a Long Row, Swann’s Yard, Nottingham NG1 2DH
Ross Bradshaw loves opening parcels. This is not what you might expect to hear from the founder of Nottingham’s radical Five Leaves Bookshop, which has had a vibrant and eventful 11-year life. Almost a year on from when a former British soldier was jailed after being found guilty of preparing to commit a terrorist attack on the store, Bradshaw tells me how the Five Leaves Bookshop came to be—and what it has become for its community.
The opening of parcels—or the "cut and thrust of bookselling", as he calls it—was what Bradshaw missed when he left the local, independent Mushroom Bookshop, which also published some books. He carried on with the publishing aspect after his departure, releasing titles across crime fiction, social history and Jewish secular culture at his "reasonably successful small press", Five Leaves. He was also on the board of a bookshop and helping to organise two festivals in Lowdham and Leicester, but he missed selling books in a brick-and-mortar bookshop.
"Mushroom had closed a few years after I left and Nottingham city had no other independent bookshop," Bradshaw says. Readers were showing interest in the types of books that he wanted to sell and the radical bookselling landscape was starting to shift. "And I was getting older, so it was now or never," he adds. He found the premises in the city centre and set up shop.
Today, the store is run by a team of booksellers with Bradshaw at the helm. "We are pretty busy on Saturdays," he tells me. "Monday and Tuesday are pretty quiet these days, but Sunday is usually the second busiest day of the week, though we are only open four hours that day." As well as customers who come in to browse and get recommendations from the team, the shop also receives orders placed by those who want to support a small indie but do not necessarily want to browse its in-store stock.
The bookshop is not located on the high street, so events are key to get customers into the shop; the booksellers hold 100 or so a year. In the past weeks, these have included a talk on the history of lesbian fashion, a conversation between human rights activist and politician Shami Chakrabarti and biographer Rachel Holmes, a launch of poetry pamphlets and a discussion with Jonathan Coe and Graham Caveney, who is the author of the recently published The Body in the Library (Peninsula Press) and used to work at Five Leaves. "This reflects only some of our interests in the shop," Bradshaw explains. "We also had a talk on ospreys!"
Most of the events are held in the store but some of the bigger ones have to be hosted at other venues due to size constraints. "We manage a lot from our 450-500 square feet, but we might, just might, be moving in a couple of years to much bigger premises, on a main street, in association with another organisation," Bradshaw says. This is still in the early stages and might not come to fruition, but the bookshop owner tells me that staff are already arguing about the types of carpets and lighting they will have in the potential new shop. "The line we are thinking of taking is ’like Five Leaves, but more so’," he says. "I guess we’ll know what that means if it happens!"
Events drive sales for the bookshop and the owner says that nine out of its 10 bestsellers are "books where something happened", whether that is an in-store conversation between authors, a stall for a festival or a book group. Non-fiction is popular among the shop’s customers, as is literary fiction, mainly in paperback. "Local interest books are always steady sellers, neurodiversity is big, fantasy was but that’s fading—something else will rise," he tells me. "Our strongest sections traditionally have been contemporary politics and poetry. History at Christmas."Hardback sales are down as budgets continue to be tight and the bookseller says that he often sees customers “weighing up whether to buy one or two of the three books they would like to buy”. However, he is hopeful about the future—and past experiences show that there is good reason to be. “We came out of Covid-19 better off than we went in as our mail order really took off, especially titles related to Black Lives Matter, an area we knew well as we’ve had a Black writing section since we started the shop,” he tells me. “As well as our direct sales we have a couple of large institutional accounts. If we could find a third, and if Christmas would happen twice a year, we’d be in clover.”
Looking ahead, the team wants to grow the shop’s event programme even more in the months to come. “One we are excited about is a day school, for want of another word, called Writing While Muslim in November, with a batch of Muslim-background writers (all women, as it happens) including Noreen Masud and A M Dassu,” the owner says. The shop’s strong sense of identity and community remain unwavering despite the challenges it has faced, but customers and good service are at the heart of the booksellers’ work. “Our heart is on the left, but first of all we are a professional, full-service bookshop,” Bradshaw says.
