Ten years, one street, and a stock list that has roughly doubled.
The shop was opened in 2014 by two booksellers who had been made redundant by a chain closing three streets away, in a unit that had been a lighting showroom and still has the wiring to prove it. The first year was thin. The thing that changed it was not a bestseller but the reading circles, which started in 2016 and turned a shop into a room people came back to.
We have made mistakes worth recording. We ran a discount table for eighteen months that trained our best customers to wait rather than buy. We kept a travel section for two years that nobody wanted and that took shelf-metres from poetry. Both are gone.
What has not changed: the stock is chosen by the people who sell it, and we say so on the card. If a publisher offers us money for the front table, we say no, and we will tell you which ones asked.
Who we areA small shop cannot win on range. It can only win on the fact that somebody here has read the book and will tell you the truth about it.Maria Tsironi · front counter