Not buying a secondhand bookshop
A secondhand bookshop in my city is up for sale. The owner is retiring. It feels like a bit of an institution - it has stood the test of time which is no mean feat nowadays. We need these places. Not just books but any independent businesses, frankly. I really hope someone cool buys it from him and it lives on.
And then, inevitably, that little thought... What if it was me?
I'm not going to buy a secondhand bookshop.
But if I did...
It's a small, awkward sort of a space. Which is very charming for the book browsing part of a bookshop. There's nowhere to have a reading or a book club or anything. Which is a downside for sure.
Apparently there are 18,000 books and thousands more unsorted. Which sounds like exactly my sort of fun. They already do sales online and posting up books like that also sounds like exactly my sort of fun. Repetitive, concentrated work.
The vibe is antiquarian and I'm not sure whether I would keep that or try to update it ever so slightly to maybe a 1900s Paris salon, or an interwar Bloomsbury thing. Sixties is absolutely as far as I would go - there's a Sixties clothes shop opposite.
It's got a nice little local section which I'd expand. That's a real strength of local places and they should play to it more. I'd also have a local indies section for people to sell their zines and poetry chapbooks and so on.
Lots of places have a subscription or a 'friends of' and certainly I'd do a newsletter. A behind the scenes. So people like me - and there are many people like me, probably including you if you are reading this - can live their vicarious dreams of running a bookshop.
Other than books they also sell art and old maps - most of my local old maps were bought there.
The rent and rates can't be that much because every other empty shop turns into a vape shop or a charity shop or a discount shop - not even a chain one. And yet so many big businesses have left the city centre - Marks and Spencers most recently - so I don't know if that's true. I don't know how that works. I suspect it is not working as it ought. I'm not going to get pessimistic.
What I am going to do is keep going to this shop. Hopefully it will get nice new owners who care about it and the place. (I can't imagine people get into the secondhand book market for the riches.) But I'll do my bit, and for the bookshop round the corner from me and for all the independent, niche, local businesses trying to do something different and interesting.