Attention all those who commute through King’s Cross. A new bookshop has opened on the concourse near platforms 9-11, next to the shrine for Platform 9¾ of Harry Potter fame.
This is the first Watermark store to open in Europe. Watermark is an Australian firm that specialises in filling small spaces in major travel hubs. It is a traditional bookseller in the sense that well educated, book-loving staff are on hand to offer customers the expertise that is usually unavailable in a travel terminal newsagent like WHSmith. (Smiths seem to be the only such retailer in Britain.) Staff sometimes have a foreign language — a useful bonus in an arena where tourists should be a major source of revenue.
There are Watermark outlets in Australia, America and the Far East. There are rumours that a further 35 stores will open in Britain and Europe, but expansion will depend on the success of the shop at King’s Cross.
Watermark is a decentralised company, so outlets reflect the tastes and experience of their staff. The King’s Cross premises is small at 1,100 square feet, but it offers a range of 7,000 books and counting. Paperbacks dominate, as you would expect in a shop that is trying to sell for the travel market. Fashionable chick-lit competes with cult books like Joshua Foer’s Moonwalking with Einstein or Mark Forsyth’s The Etymologicon. There is also an impressive selection of hardbacks, much of it diverting or specialist: the shop’s first sale was one those gloriously cumbersome books on gardening.
There are 11 members of staff — a large number given the shop’s size, which emphasises the reliance on people above bulk discounts and technical gizmos. There is no interactive service for customers as you might find in a high street bookshop these days, although Watermark offers an extensive digital range.
This may seem to be a strange time to open a bricks and mortar bookshop, but there are still niches to be found in the traditional market. Or that is the thinking at least. It’s exciting, trying to defy trends always is.
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