Following on from this post, here is the first dive into the bookshops I visited several times over the course of last year. It seems logical to start with Waterstone's.
Why? Because Waterstone's is the most instantaneously recognisable bookshop on any UK high street and because, for me at least, it epitomises the university bookshop. Mind you, when I started in the mid-1990s, my local campus bookshop was, in fact, Dillons, but soon after, it was taken over by Waterstone's and rebranded as such.
Waterstone's as a company has been in trouble for a number of years. Sure, it sits at the intersection of populist bookstore and cater-to-any-taste-bookstore, and certainly in the past different branches used to cater for different readerships and very well did they do so too.
But as more and more readers default to e-readers and more and more buy from Amazon and other, lesser known, online retailers, the fortunes of Waterstone's have dwindled. When a few years back I heard that they were scrapping their legendary 3-for-2 summer offers, it all seemed ominous. We cannot afford it any longer, it sounded like to me, and while more and more additional items are being sold in various Waterstone's (from Scrabble mugs to board games), I've felt for quite some years that their stores are suffering from a veritable identity crisis.
Not long ago, different shops looked and felt quite unique, despite the homogeneous branding. For example, the Lancaster University branch, with its extraordinary selection of business and management books, as well as classics, had little in common with the Waterstone's in St Anne's Square in Manchester (before it upped sticks to the Arndale Centre) which, in turn, was very different from the one around the corner, Manchester Deansgate.
In those days, and I am specifically referring to approximately 15 years ago, pushing 20, store managers had much greater freedom in which titles they would stock, as well as in how to present said stock. While board games tended to rear their heads only around Christmas times, now every Waterstone's is lumbered with tack which has very little to do with books. The sections for children often make me wonder whether I'm in a toy shop that also stocks popular books (Waterstone's Hampstead is one of the worst offenders), while the stationery sections are perilously free-falling into twee utilitarianism (washi tapes, butterfly-shaped paperclips) whose connection with books is tenuous at best.
Mind you, I speak as a sucker, to put it prosaically, for washi tapes and useless paper-things, but those are not items that I feel are truly at home in a bookshop. I go to bookshops to buy books, not to be assaulted by a raft of other crap, from mugs to puzzles, to jenga towers, to cuddly toys, to Mikado sets, to wrapping paper, to build-your-own-desk-garden kits. Waterstone's has all of these and then some.
The giant one in Piccadilly is remarkably apt at stocking multiple Monopoly limited editions, and yet desperately lacks in the art and photography sections, to name but two. Many other bookstores do not stock irrelevant items (Slightly Foxed springs to mind) and that's where I always find books I never even knew existed. In short, where there is no crap, you get to see, discover, and enjoy only the books.
Who knows what the future holds for this well-known brand of the British retail landscape. While I always stop at whichever Waterstone's I chance upon (I think a part of me feels compelled to try to love it), it remains the bookshop in which I am least likely to buy any book at all.
