Traditional Second-Hand Bookshops in Britain

How many of the classic, 'traditional' type of second-hand bookshop are there left in Britain? 

The Book Guide defines a second-hand bookshop for purposes of its listings as:

‘Any business with a significant stock of second-hand or collectable books, that welcomes visitors at advertised times or by prior appointment. This includes permanent units in antique markets, private book-rooms and weekly market stalls. Stock can be small if good, but books should be the only or main holdings. Thus, a charity bookshop should be included, but a general charity shop should not, unless it has a room's-worth of books.’

This is an inclusive definition, because readers’ and collectors’ needs and tastes vary. Some want pristine literary first editions: others like rummaging among dog-eared paperbacks. Some are looking for books they don’t know they want until they see them: others have very specific collecting requirements.

On this definition, the Guide indicates there are still about a thousand places of different sorts offering second-hand books for sale in the UK. And there is an interesting trend for hybrid venues, eg new and old books together; book cafes; book and record shops; books and retro curios; community book swaps, and so on. It is worth noting that for the assiduous collector all these are worth at least a look, and certainly I have had some unexpected finds in such miscellaneous places.

However, some readers have a particular fondness for what is termed a ‘proper’, ‘real’, ‘traditional’ ‘old fashioned’ or ‘old style’ bookshop. It is these sorts of shops that readers suggest are disappearing. I’m not sure they have been exactly defined, but I think I know the sort of place wistful browsers have in mind.

Typically, it will be privately-owned (ie not a charity bookshop); it will be in its own dedicated premises (ie not a unit in an antiques centre nor a marker stall); it will be a shop usually open most high street hours (ie not by appointment); and it will have a wide general stock. Some readers will no doubt add other characteristics they like to find, such as a crackling wireless tuned to the Third Programme, tottering columns of undisturbed tomes, secret rooms, a sleeping cat, but I assume these are pleasing embellishments rather than essentials.

So how many of these types of bookshops are in fact left? To find out, I have still relied on the listings in The Book Guide, but I have counted only those that seem, from the details provided or readers’ reviews, to meet the basic description I have outlined. The result is that there appear to be about 365 ‘old style’ bookshops still open in the UK. A resourceful browser could, subject to opening hours, visit a different one a day for a year.

They are fairly evenly spread, with typically around 30-40 examples in most of the nations and regions:

38 Midlands

36 E Anglia

43 London

25 North East

36 North West

31 South East

36 South West

36 Southern

49 Scotland

28 Wales

7 N Ireland

Let me emphasise, however, that somebody else might come up with a different total. Their criteria might be more strict or more flexible. But as a first attempt to identify the extent of a particular sort of bookshop I hope this will at least be a start: and it gives a broad sense of numbers.

How this number compares to past periods would be quite tricky to determine. I have not seen a comprehensive directory for the first half of the twentieth century, but my impression from book trade memoirs, book magazines and so on is that there were fairly few outside London, Edinburgh and the university cities. Most readers got their books from circulating libraries, whose stickers, stamps and labels may still be seen in copies that have survived.

I also suspect, but it is only a surmise, that the number of general second-hand bookshops expanded from the early Nineteen Sixties. The number of books published annually in the UK had been increasing for some years, as a succession of British Books in Print catalogues shows.  For example, 11,004 were issued in 1920, and 16,572 in 1936. And that is to say nothing of the volume, the print runs. As most new books become second-hand books, the available stock is cumulative, notwithstanding pulped and discarded copies. The population of customers very likely increased too, particularly with the spread of further education.

When the perceived decline in the number of 'old style' bookshops began is hard to pin down, though readers and collectors tend understandably to link it to the  economic conditions of the later 20th century and the rise of the internet and the personal computer. If so, the period of the ubiquitous ‘proper’ bookshop of fond memory was probably fairly brief in historical terms: twenty to thirty years. But perhaps there is also now a greater variety and flexibility in places where a small selection of old books may be encountered, as I suggested in my earlier post on 'Finding books in out of the way places'.

As I have also noted before, the idea that ‘traditional’ bookshops are disappearing is a tradition in itself. In Cynthia Asquith’s excellent anthology The Ghost Book (1926), one of the stories, ‘The Lost Tragedy’ by Denis Mackail, is a gently humorous piece set in a London second-hand bookshop. The narrator says: ‘Mr Bunstable’s book-shop represents a type of establishment which has pretty well disappeared from our modern cities’. I expect Edwardian collectors lamented the Victorian heyday of the bookshop, when the Peacocks and the Austens could simply be plucked from the shelves.

(Mark Valentine)

Image: Notice at Westwood’s Books, Sedbergh (Jo Valentine)