Last week I discovered the Quayside Bookshop in Teignmouth, Devon. In his storybook premises, where new second-hand and trendy books mix, it is almost impossible not to buy something. Just before I left its cozy confines, I peered into a shadowy doorway and the friendly shopkeeper offered to show me the back room. She turned on the light, and I entered such a cave of sea books that I heard the mid-Atlantic crash in my head. Tudor Rigging, Elements of Sailing Kipping, Atlantic Seaweed, Law of Salvage…
This store does not have a website but is on Facebook and the Caboodle website. Much is made of a decline in reading and attention spans, but we word beasts have survived five major challenges to focus: the advent of language, writing, print, then screens, then AI. Hits like these send us to bookstores the way Spotify has us buying vinyl and even cassettes again. Malcolm Gladwell says he “focuses on the screen” but needs to go to a bookstore to take his mind off the algorithms.
In particular, independent bookstores are booming. Although 41 closed in the UK in 2025, 77 opened, so there are now over 400. The US, which with India has the most book readers per capita, has 3,000 indie bookstores, a 70 percent increase since 2020.
Bookstores have always survived social changes by transforming themselves. In the era of backroom bookstores, Slaney & McKay, the Chelsea indie where I worked in the Eighties, had a “Style and Gender” section that flouted the rules of Dewey classification to offer works on tattoos, graffiti, high art, punk, leather jackets, Hermann Hesse’s rights, and the revival. Regulars included Francis Bacon, Anthony Hopkins, Brian Eno and the Rolling Stones. Bookshop cafes were just getting started. The Waterstones Canterbury I managed for 30 years had such a good top floor cafe that people from all over the world asked for our secret grill recipe. Tim Waterstone gave me the new store in Canterbury in 1990, and I blush to write that when he asked me why I should have such a sought-after four-storey store, I said, “I’ll set Canterbury on fire.” Well, I’ve had more than 2,000 authors for personal conversations, from Edward Heath to Roy Jenkins, Bonnie Garmus to Sebastian Faulks. I called Umberto Eco’s publisher in Milan to get that too; he said no but he wanted to work in my shop for a day. Someone is out there who bought without knowing Foucault’s Pendulum from its author: Eco nodded slightly as she made the sale to indicate that she wished to remain anonymous.
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Bookstores are rightly romanticized in books, by 84 Charing Cross Road THE Day at the Morisaki Bookstoreand in movies, by Funny face in 1957 until Notting Hill in 1999. But they are also crucial bastions of free speech, canaries in the democratic coal mine. NYU academic Andras Kisery says that bookstore history is a burgeoning discipline that involves the “theoretical decentralization of the author”: cultural history has implicitly excluded not only how booksellers regulate and promote books, but also bookstores as meeting places and event spaces: Habermasian forums. Authors are heroic, but they are nothing without the window screen, the blackboard, the fearless and often destitute bookseller.
When Shakespeare died, people couldn’t buy his plays. By 1623, Edward Dering bought a First Folio of Shakespeare at Blount’s Bookshop for a quid. Surprisingly, Edward Blount ended up a pauper. Samuel Johnson met James Boswell in a bookshop, William Wilberforce held anti-slavery meetings in Hatchards Piccadilly, The Fabian Society met in Dillons Gower Street, Hermann Hesse and George Orwell were booksellers, Franz Kafka only gave a bookshop speech in Prague, which brought them to tears and restored his view of Kavren. Shakespeare and Company in Paris took Ulysses published, gave F Scott Fitzgerald to work, and when the Gestapo told owner Sylvia Beach to close the shop, she simply hid all the books upstairs until liberation day. Christina Foyle was also contemptuous of Hitler, writing to tell him to send her books instead of burning them. He replied that he did not want to corrupt a nation that was about to conquer him. She wrote again (this is all in the unpublished Foyles archive) that she had bought 1,000 copies of My fight to line its roof against bomb damage. Meanwhile in Berlin, the Polish Jewish bookseller Françoise Frenkel bravely faced arrest and Kristallnacht to run her shop as a center for free discussion: her memoirs were only rediscovered in 2010 at a flea market. City Lights in San Francisco fueled the Beat Generation. Diana Gravill’s Compilation Books in Camden opened in the eighties; THE Guardian said it was the destination store for “anarchism, poststructuralism, feminism, Buddhism, and psychology,” and my friend Ingrid insists her energy was so powerful that she spontaneously orgasmed while browsing there. Stonewall simply wouldn’t have happened without Craig Rodwell’s pioneering New York gay bookstore. Gay’s the Word in Bloomsbury survived the fire and still supports the cause. There are temporary setbacks: the status of Samir Mansour’s long-established bookshop in Gaza is unknown, but worldwide funding for the previous multiple rebuilds means it will grow again.
Since I started selling books, the industry has faced the advent of the Internet, Amazon, chains and high parking fees. After Tim Waterstone hired me, I enjoyed the early years of pirates in London, but unfortunate takeovers followed: WH Smith told us we should rule by crowd and uniformity. HMV said we were “too in love with the product”, banned the “recommend” cards as unprofessional and put us in uniforms. Fortunately these days James Daunt has restored the branch’s independence. Both Blackwell’s and Foyles’ heirs asked him to preserve their historic operations, which he did with ingenuity, economies of scale and his ex-banker’s acumen. He has even rescued Barnes & Noble in the US from its corporate doldrums, freeing up its more than 700 stores to shop locally and allowing staff to wear jeans. He is Beethoven to Tim Waterstone’s Bach.
And then there’s Stravinsky: Robert Topping’s five big stores have enviable stocks and major industry events, and his magnetic faith in books makes his stores buzz with all ages. Chain stores get a lot of criticism. But they are accessible havens for young people, for children and mothers, they open in tough towns like Chatham where no indie would dare, and without them publishing would shrink drastically and lose a lot of diversity. In 1960s London I bought books from WH Smith; independents and Hatchards seemed too forbidding to working-class kids.
Far from disappearing, bookshops are in a golden age of reinvention and democratization – with the help of coffee, writing, author events and Samuel Beckett’s advice to authors: “find your weirdness” (be more Teignmouth). James Daunt thinks TikTok is the best thing for selling books since Harry Potter. Information from social media manipulates us; bookstores set us free. When I was working at Waterstones Canterbury recently, I met a schoolgirl from Venice. “Here,” she said, pointing around her, “is like a dream to me.”
(Further reading: Don’t blame AI for bad writing)
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