Back to the future

Mark Mason

Thursday, 27th October 2011

Something truly incredible has happened in a village near me. A new bookshop has opened. I know – staggering, isn’t it? But I promise you, I’ve seen it with my own eyes. Even been inside. It’s called the Open Road Bookshop, in Stoke by Nayland, close to the Suffolk/Essex border. Pretty little place (both the shop and the village). Sells secondhand books. That’s it – just books. No café, no multimedia community info-hub, no sideline in pottery or bric-a-brac. Admittedly the owner, Dave Charleston, has done things rather well. Plenty of books, covering just about every subject you could think of, and they’re beautifully displayed (cricket ball as a bookend for the cricket books, a pipe doing the same for those on smoking ...) But essentially that’s the deal: you go in, see a book you like – a proper, physical book, with pages and everything – give Dave some money and he lets you take it away.

It struck me as I browsed the shelves in there (about the only way books can injure you – cricked neck) that, perversely, secondhand bookshops might have a stronger future than new bookshops. The latter, as we all know, are dropping like weary packhorses under the onerous economics of retailing. Supermarket discounts sometimes mean it’s cheaper for a bookstore to get their stock from Tesco than from the publisher. Not that the writer in me is automatically anti-change – Amazon, for instance, is never out of stock, so I won’t hear that dreaded sentence ‘I tried to buy your book the other day but they didn’t have any copies left ...’ The thought of a world without bookshops, though, is a chilling one.

So could secondhand shops be the cockroaches that survive this nuclear winter? If the trend towards e-books continues, and such physical copies as people do buy are delivered by post, the newbies may well get vapourised. That will leave us, however, with literally tens of millions of physical books from the BC era (Before Computers). They’ll be sitting there on people’s shelves and in their attics, and sooner or later at least some of them will need new homes. Meanwhile, as fingers sweep over iPads and thumbs press Kindle buttons, people will yearn (as they always have, and always will) for Something Different. The novelty value will be in physically browsing a shelf, not for the few dozen titles that are out that month and you already know about from Front Row and the newspaper review pages, but for titles you’ve never heard of, or meant to read but never got round to reading, or whose cover just plain intrigues you.

What’s more, if Dave is anything to go by people will always be attracted to the idea of running secondhand bookshops. Business is good, apparently, and after a career in teaching he’s "enjoying the periods of peace and quiet. Time to read. Do some thinking. Enjoy the tingle of customers browsing, the little noises they make and the perfumes they bring in to the shop." He’s even working on something ("a kind of commonplace book") called ‘The Last Bookshop’ – "a sixty year old man having conversations with himself, his former selves, other writers and the occasional customer".

Of course charity shops are a threat (getting their stock for nothing means they can sell at lower prices). But the thing that at first makes you assume secondhand bookshops must be doomed – their old-fashioned image – could in time become their greatest strength. We could end up in the strange position where books are a product that people will go to a shop to buy secondhand, but not new. It might just be a case of back to the future.

Blog Tags: Bookshops , Internet , Publishing , Technology