Independent Bookshops: All the reasons why we must support them

It's Independent Bookshop Week and at my local, Gloucester Road Books, I spoke with the lovely owner, Tom about community, sharing and the brilliant books being published by independent presses

Tom, owner of Gloucester Road Books, Bristol

When I enter the shop Tom is busy at a bookshelf. He acknowledges me coming in but isn’t able to turn around until he has done what he needs to do, which is rearrange a couple of books that are out of place. ‘It’s like weeding,’ he says. ‘Once you see one bit, you realise it’s all over the place and you can’t move onto the next thing until it’s sorted out.’

Tom is a master curator, and his bookshop Gloucester Road Books reminds me of an art gallery. He is expert at arranging all the most stunning book jackets face out, so there is a mosaic like effect in each section. The initial impact on walking in is aesthetic - this bookshop is immensely pleasing to the eye. And then the intrigue sets in, hovering here and there, picking up this book, flicking through its pages, damning the self for not having more money in the bank to buy yet another bagful of books you didn’t realise you wanted, or enough time to read them allI often drop in to say ‘Hi!’, or to buy a card, or to pick up a book I have ordered via their email service, and leave some time later with a bag far heavier than I intended it to be. When I am here chatting with Tom this morning, we joke that there should be chairs that people can pull up so they can sample all the books they want to sample, get lost inside their pages. ‘We’ve often thought of that,’ Tom says, ‘But the shop is too small, and the chairs get in the way of the books.’ At Gloucester Road Books, it is all about the books. It is a book lover’s dream.

This morning, because it’s Independent Bookshop Week I want to ask Tom how the shop came to be. I remember it opening during the pandemic and I also remember feeling astonished that it joined only a few other independent bookshops in my hometown of Bristol. It felt like it was essential for the community at that time, and as a result the community in which it landed has actively supported it ever since. The bookshop has gone from strength to strength, now running very popular events which spill out into local church halls, and host the likes of Jan Carson, Jonathan Coe, Charlotte Philby and even Zadie Smith.

Tom tells me how after graduating from art school he started his working life at Waterstones. Ten years later, he was still working there, but getting increasingly fed up with the limitations of a large commercially-driven chain bookshop, frustrated he couldn’t have the contribution he wanted to have. He recalls unpacking another box of memoirs by some Tory wife or other, and realised that he had to get out.

He moved to Bristol and decided to start his own bookshop, and found this premises, a shop that had been a florist for decades. Things were not easy at first, as he was negotiating the lease right up until a few days before lockdown, but managed to hold off until later in the year. Still in the midst of the pandemic, he spent from August to April renovating.

‘It’s really important to have a clear intention when you’re running an independent bookshop,’ he tells me. ‘Because everyone knows they can get a book cheaper from Amazon, and you’re asking people to pay more than they need to. You’re asking for a certain act of good will - or collaboration or community.’ Tom goes on to say that he is very aware that as a bookseller he needs to offer something extra to his customers. ‘I do that by creating a space and environment that is enjoyable and exciting to enter for a book reader or a browser. The experience needs to be significant.’

Tom also supports small presses in the store because they represent the same ethos as the independent bookshops. ‘But also,’ Tom adds. ‘It is true that a lot of the most interesting and risk-taking publishing is coming from small presses right now.’

We go on to discuss how, unlike mainstream publishers, independent presses don’t flood the market with an attempt to follow a successful book. They publish a book because they believe in it.

Another lovely characteristic of Tom’s shop is how he places books together by publisher in a specific indie press section. ‘This is about visibility,’ he says, ‘but it’s also about putting a book with another book that is similar but different, and introducing customers to books they might not have been aware of.’ He compares it to music lovers who become fixated with a particular record label and listen to every artist that that label produces, because if they get it right once, they might get it right multiple times, right?

Out of the small presses that Gloucester Road stocks, Tom highlights Fitzcarraldo as having the biggest impact in recent years, their visibility and reputation getting stronger year on year. Another indie press that has been around for a while but still going strong is And Other Stories. I remember them publishing Deborah Levy many moons ago, before she was picked up by the mainstream publishers. ‘There are lots of new publishers doing interesting things,’ Tom says. ‘Some of the newer indie presses to look out for are Peirene Press, and Joan Publishing’.

There is something in the way Tom categorises the books, which also really works. I love his nonfiction sections, which are divided thematically: essays might be together with thematic memoir, and sociology and anthropology. Similarly, in the Time and Place category, there’s anything concerned with time or place, which could cover history, travel literature and geography. Again, this is another way for browsers to discover books that they might not have thought about before. It’s giving a wider view than the subject you thought you might have been looking for. The chain bookshops are often more prescriptive and unimaginative. ‘I want people to find a book on their own terms.’ Tom says.

Today, to celebrate Independent Bookshop Week, they have brought a number of their favourites from indie presses to the front of the bookshop, onto the table, and into the window display. Spaces that are usually reserved for new releases. ‘This area and the window display changes all the time to make the bookshop look fresh,’ Tom says. ‘The catchment is quite consistent with the same people coming in regularly and so there should always be a turnaround of new things for them to see.’

I asked Tom the five reasons why someone should shop in their local independent bookshop rather than chain bookshops like Waterstones, or (God forbid) Amazon, and here are his answers (there actually are many more than five reasons, but I’ve tried to keep it succinct!)

1. Because the books will be carefully chosen and they are there because booksellers believe they should be.

2. It supports the high street, so that money spent in the bookshop stays in the local area. I buy my groceries from the shop next door. And therefore the money stays in the community.

3. The tax benefits for the country are far better if you spend money in your local shops rather than in an organisation that has off-shore strategies. So it’s better for everyone if you shop local.

4. A local shop is part of the community. I get to know the locals. People come in and chat and we build up a sense of what a person enjoys, and therefore we can then recommend books on that basis. We build relationships and knowledge about books through interaction and discussion and the human imagination, which is so much better, more interesting and more reliable, than having some recommendation thrown up by an algorithm.

5. It’s fun! Browsing a well curated, well organised carefully thought out bookshop is enjoyable. Book browsing is a pleasure in itself.

6. (and we did get one more in) - Interesting books are easier to discover in a small space, rather than a big space where they easily get lost.

Tom told me we are at an exciting time for independent bookshops because numbers are starting to rise again. They almost halved with the growth of Amazon, the kindle and the influence of the credit crunch, and after Covid numbers began to improve again. When Tom opened Gloucester Road Books in 2020 there were maybe only two other genuinely independent bookshops in Bristol, Max Minerva and Storysmith. But in recent years we’ve seen another four independent bookshops opening - Bookhaus, Heron Books, The Small City Bookshop and East Bristol Books.

Tom’s all-time favourite bookshop is City Lights in San Francisco, but it’s in a different league - ‘extraordinary, enormous, an institution’. In the UK, he loves London Review of Books in Bloomsbury, and the East London bookshops – Burley Fisher and Pages of Hackney, are doing good things. Here in Bristol he’s also keen on Storysmith, who, like Gloucester Road Books, are host to some excellent events.

But Tom is so busy running his own shop he barely has the time to go browsing in other independent bookshops. That’s for all you lot to test out. Please tell me below what’s your local bookshop, and why - and how do you help keep it in business?