How bricks-and-mortar bookshops are adapting to survive

I’m sure many readers of this newsletter feel fondly towards particular bookshops – those comforting, magical places in which we can while away hours (I have been known to describe the gigantic Foyles on Charing Cross Road as my church). Indeed, bookshops “attract emotional investment in a way that a bakery or shoe shop scarcely can”, writes Andrew Pettegree in the opening of The Bookshop, published earlier this week. Today, we take a look at his impassioned history of bookselling, and consider the future of the brick-and-mortar bookshop.

Plus, China Miéville – whose latest novel (coming in at 1,264 pages, no less) The Rouse is out now – shares his favourite recent reads.

It feels as if we’re increasingly seeing bookshops doubling as coffee shops or wine bars in recent years, as business owners try to broaden their customer base in tough financial times. “Bookshops are the Swiss army knives of retail,” the Bookseller Association managing director Meryl Halls tells me. They are “constantly adding new tools to remain cutting-edge while always staying rooted in books and reading”.

Yet, as Pettegree points out in The Bookshop, this survival instinct has a long precedent: in the 17th century, few shopkeepers would “risk their livelihoods on the exclusive sale of books”, with most offering a range of other goods too – stationery, medical supplies, newspapers – effectively, they were general stores.

Pettegree describes bookselling as a “drug”, with booksellers unable to conceive of another way of life. “But like all drugs, this could be dangerous, and concentration on the romance of books, rather than attention to the bottom line, could easily bring disaster.”

However, many bookshops have survived while “other high street stalwarts have fallen away,” Halls says. “There is something in their DNA that instinctively looks for where readers are going, rather than where they have been.”

One direction seems to be genre fiction. Specialist shops – for romantasy and science fiction, for example – are popping up across the UK; the Bookseller Association now has 52 genre-specialist shops among its members, a net increase of 16 in just over a year, Halls says. Bookshops are trying to reach untapped but very significant sections of the market, harnessing online communities built on BookTok, “giving those fandoms vibrant physical spaces, expert curation and a place to belong”.

Yet, Pettegree tells us that once again this is nothing new, tracing the history of specialist bookshops from the religious bookshop to the communist bookshop, the women’s bookshop and the Black bookshop of the 20th century. These shops have often faced threats: in 1973, Unity Bookshop in Brixton, specialising in Black literature, was burned down by a firebomb; in 1977, Black booksellers logged 13 attacks on seven radical bookshops, writes Pettegree. These included London’s New Beacon Books, which remains open today (but continues to face attacks – it was vandalised as recently as April).

Through Pettegree’s history, threats to bookshops and book culture more generally pile up: censorship, Amazon and, naturally, AI. He argues that, given the continual predictions that new technologies would bring down the book industry, “its resilience has been one of the cultural miracles of the last century”. And I was relieved to read that he’s optimistic about the future: “books and bookshops have given us a great deal, and I see no plausible reason why this should not continue for generations to come”.