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Yesterday, I read a rather lengthy article on the, once great, British book trade, which appeared in The Guardian.

You can read Part One, here, and Part Two, here.

Rather surprisingly, the article was rather optimistic about the future of our glorious independent booksellers. Stephen Moss, the author, travels across the country, interviewing the owners of successful, relatively small, independent bookshops.

I assumed that small bookshops were an endangered species, with no chance of fighting off the industry behemoths, such as Waterstones, Boarders, and Ottakar’s, not to mention the huge discounting capacity of online-only titan Amazon. But it seems, as is the case in many retail sectors, that specialisation, or exploiting the benefits of localism, can make a diminutive bookshop, a sustainable enterprise.

It’s a refreshing read, and it’s heartening to read about buccaneering Britons, using their expertise, labour, and enterprise, to maintain a limpet-like toehold in a saturated, and increasingly cutthroat, market. Indeed, the overwhelming message from these successful literary entrepreneurs is, “Don’t discount.” A business model based on informed service, community links (book groups, signings, etc), a clever location, and great coffee, can, it seems, offer reasonable returns.

I live in the Nottinghamshire market town of Newark-on-Trent. We have a population of around 35,000, and we have 3-bookshops, which considering our proximity to the second-hand bookshop Mecca, that is Lincoln, is fairly good. One of our bookshops is a heavily discounted publisher outlet, where stock, unsold at the suggested retail price, is sold off, probably at a loss. We also have a popular Christian Bookshop, which has recently relocated to larger premises, suggesting a vociferous appetite for priestly tomes, and books about rugby players, who have found God.

The third and final bookshop is Buy The Book, which appears to be an outlet of a regional book co-operative, with other stores dotted around the local towns. It has a fairly good selection of fiction and non-fiction, a brilliant children’s section, and a cracking little coffee shop. And the shop appears, at least this is the impression I get, to be a central hub of the community’s aspirational bourgeoisie.

The assistants (or should I say booksellers?) who ably man the tills at Buy The Book, are informed, passionate, and friendly. They talk to your children, as the fidgeting tykes mess with the point-of-sale paraphernalia, and conspire with them about hoodwinking mummy or daddy into buying them a bookmark or some other literary-related tat. They know the difference between the LRB, and TLS, and they know what ‘dialectic’ means. I wonder, do you get the same informed service in Boarders, or am I just being conceited? Anyone who remembers Waterstones, a decade ago, and has been in one recently, will know what I mean.

Newark is a rural conservative town; we have a cattle market, antiques fair, and a true-blue Tory MP. So it’s fair to say that it’s not full of coffee-drinking liberals, save, perhaps of course, yours truly, yet Newark’s few continental style coffee shops, do a roaring trade. You see the British people are increasingly ambitious, both culturally, and intellectually. We can see that the benefits of having a good booksellers in our town, outweighs the increased cost of procuring the latest Nick Hornby. We know we can buy the same book for 40% less, on Amazon, yet we still love our bookshop. Why? Because it’s our bookshop.