The Creative Identity

On Bookshops - Part II

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... Read more →

On Bookshops - Part I

In my 2013 snapshot I mentioned that I regularly visited 19 bookshops. After that post, I received a small number of emails whose authors commented on these 19 bookshops. A couple of people said that they don't even have 19 bookshops within 19 miles from home. Someone else said that it must be amazing to live somewhere with so many bookshops and would I care to say a little bit more about these places? It really got me thinking. When I was in Cheshire I was painfully aware of the problem of bookshops as a dying breed on the high street. Now I think about it, there were only four Waterstone's I could visit (in Knutsford, Wilmslow, two in Manchester) and one Oxfam (in Alderley Edge which, I've heard, has now been converted into a regular Oxfam unfortunately). The only supremely notable exception to this vast pool of sameness (I am referring to Waterstone's) was (is) Simply Books in Bramhall. Simply Books in Bramhall, Cheshire I have extremely fond memories of buying from Simply especially at the end of 2012, when I was retreating in my grief and I would drag myself out of the house 'for a look at the bookshop', as I used to tell myself, and would always come home with two, three books. I bought a lot of picture books from Simply, and books about food and books about grief. It is quite possibly one of the smallest bookshops I've ever visited; a small room on... Read more →