
This takes place this Saturday, 29 April, today. Out there and buy a book!
LitHub marks the occasion with a little piece entitled 10 of the Best Indie Bookstores in the World. Warning: visiting them all will require quite a bit of travel, but what better now that Spring beckons? Oops; I guess Australia’s tending towards winter though.
What makes a bookstore a “best bookstore”? Going there a lot is probably, for me, the primary requirement, which kind of rules out trips to Oz or Ireland. Bowes & Bowes* in Cambridge probably heads my list — as a student I was in and out all the time. One of their best features was that they were willing to open accounts for undergraduates — and the bill would be settled by my parents at the end of the term (I guess). In the same genre I remember fondly the shop in Sedbergh, Titus Wilson’s, where we used to go to get our schoolbooks, on the same financial basis. I don’t think it really was a bookstore: they just got in the books we’d have to buy and we bought them — not a bad business model! Another favorite was the bookshop in Galashiels, called I think, Dawson’s (but I’d be prepared to be told I was wrong). It disappeared so long ago that I find it difficult to identify even where it was — it just doesn’t look like a shop was ever there!
Actually, I suspect that the key feature in making a place your favorite is the opening of an account. If you can walk out with a book without having to bother about any sort of payment, I suspect you’re likely to return more often and to buy more books. Our local liquor store gets my business on this basis — though in their case it’s “Charge to the card on file?”: that does the trick, and it means you don’t even need to pack a wallet to come out merry! Bookstores: consider the opening of customer accounts as a way of keeping customers loyal. Of course deadbeats do need to be identified up front.
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* For those who care there’s a nice recent history of Bowes & Bowes in the comments at the post Oldest bookstore.