The Scarthin Way -How Independent Bookshops can Survive?

“We’re just here to get some Lunch”; How can Independent Bookshops Survive?

Can bookshops survive on the High Street – or anywhere else for that matter?  By sticking obstinately to our well-tried ways perhaps? To quote the opening of our own bookshop leaflet: Welcome to the picturesque performances of this ancient trade, daily and free of charge! Growing since 1497 (or was it 1794), free of plans, budgets, missions statements and piped music…Or should we be going with the flow, “growing” our footfall, offering wi-fi, downloads and Kindles – not forgetting coffee. Scarthin Books has long had a busy café; only today I overheard the phrase, spoken into a mobile phone, that heads this article. At least the speaker finished by saying “but afterwards we’ll have a mooch around in case there’s any books we want.”

Popping into Janette Ray’s little rare-book shop, in a historic York thronged with half-term visitors, I was handed a leaflet listing no less than thirteen booksellers in the City. How can so many survive, even in York? These days we are told how many bookshops, as well as pubs, are closing, but we still wonder how so many of both can survive, and the sobering reasons for survival are often the same for bookshops as they are pubs: many offer only a part-time wage to their owners and next to none for employed staff; many are retirement pastimes; many are run for personal satisfaction by proprietors who don’t need (even if they hope for) a significant income. How do you earn a proper living as publican or bookseller these days?

Bookshops have opportunities not open to pubs. Firstly, two of the York bookshops are run by Oxfam, benefiting from the gift of stock, from voluntary labour and from charitable status. I don’t know of any “charity pubs”, though there is a growing movement to run both pubs and bookshops as “community” enterprises. Secondly, several of the shops are in reality fronts for a radically different type of business, namely the sale of valuable rare and antiquarian volumes through private networks, catalogues, bookfairs and internet sites. The shop, with its glittering stock of “handpicked” volumes, is not expected to sell much over the counter, it is there to establish the credentials of the business and to attract the rarities that are the real bread and butter of the well-connected, scholarly proprietor; indeed two of the York shops are not even open to the public except by appointment, and another warns the visitor that it is only “usually” open during its business hours. I suppose some pubs have traditionally been fronts for other related activities, the most respectable of which might involve live music or nightclubs for teens and twenties, and many have now diversified into selling coffees and meals – more about diversification later. The third striking difference between the list of York bookshops and the world of pubs is that, excepting Oxfam, none of the York booksellers are part of a national chain. theres no equivalent of Witherspoon’s.

Wait a minute, you will be objecting, what about Waterstones and W.H.Smith’s! You’ve found me out! I deliberately hadn’t mentioned that the York leaflet lists only “secondhand and antiquarian booksellers” and it is these that I’ve been discussing so far. What sort of animals are new-book bookshops? If you go onto the web and search for the Booksellers Association (BA) you will find that their database lists ten members in York, not far short of the number of secondhand and antiquarian businesses. It seems that new bookshops must be surviving too. This initial impression is misleading; the York booksellers include not only two branches of the  W.H.Smith newsagents’ chain, one Waterstone’s,  a Wesley Owen Christian Bookshop and a Blackwell’s University Bookshop, but also FOUR supermarkets – two Tescos and two Sainsburys. In contrast to the TEN independents out of thirteen second-hand and antiquarian booksellers, there is only ONE independent out of ten new bookshops– the Little Apple Bookshop in High Petergate. Sellers of old books insist on individual freedom, sellers of new books are chained together. Survival as a new bookshop seems almost to require being part of a chain, benefiting from the advantages of scale in advertising and being able to buy at preferential discounts. Relatively late entrants into bookselling, the giant supermarket chains are now increasing their booksales (not “growing” them, please) by double-figure percentages annually and are, along with Amazon and other internet sellers, threatening even the largest specialist bookselling chains. What hope can there be for the individually owned and operated independent bookshops?

 Despite the domination of their subscription-base by giant chains, the BA has latterly been trying to raise the profile of the Independents with shared marketing campaigns and “Independent Booksellers Week”. Too little, too late, I fear; the number of independent shops has shrunk by a third within the last decade. In this situation, I was very surprised to find the Trade Association we’ve been a member of for 38 years suddenly introducing a major price-hike to our annual membership fee - for the first time in all those years, they are calculating our subscription on the basis of our TOTAL booksales, not just sales of new books, but sales of second-hand and antiquarian books too!

Why have the BA finally caught up with the secret of Scarthin Books (and before us, of Galloway and Porter in Cambridge, for instance), that a good way to thrive is to sell both new and old books? It seems that four years ago a survey of the American book scene revealed that an actual majority of shops there do both.  In our shop, we realised from the beginning that being a substantial stockist of second-hand books adds depth and excitement to an otherwise predictably fashion-following new bookshop, while the stocking of new up-to-the-minute books keeps a second-hand bookshop young, inviting and inclusive, rather than gloomy and forbidding to the uninitiated. Customers often trade in their old books for new, and some of those old books are like old lamps to the collector. Children learn to like books and bookshops here in a way hardly possible in a second-hand shop. Families and friends with diverse interests can disperse to search for the latest TV cookbook or for scarce out-of-print monographs on their enthusiasm – both have at least a chance of success, and both may be diverted from new to old or from old to new. And of course there must be a café. We never feel we have been truly welcomed or have really made a place our own until we eat and drink there – whether it be a friend’s home or a mountaintop, a museum or a bookshop - and a good bookshop is a museum you can buy a bit of .

Will the Booksellers’ Association succeed in a takeover bid for ALL bookshops? It seems unlikely that most secondhand and antiquarian dealers will be interested in joining, although the ability to sell and exchange book tokens might be a carrot, and how will their own associations, the Provincial Booksellers Fairs Association (PBFA) and the Antiquarian Booksellers Association (ABA) react?  

Should booksellers stick to well-tried ways or embrace change? Why not embrace a change to the well-tried Scarthin way?