Death of the second-hand bookshop
April 11th, 2007 by Vanessa
At the weekend, Guardian columnist Simon Hoggart waxed lyrical about the perfect second-hand bookshop – the mustiness, the feeling of time unchanging, the attachment of the shopkeeper to his stock – and observed how sad it was that these establishments were being ousted by the growth in on-line bookshops such as Ibooknet and Amazon’s Marketplace.
Today this was parried by Christopher Lowndes who pointed out that such romanticism was all very well, but the real reason that bookshops were closing and that that the High Street was becoming so homogenous was because landlords were getting greedier and forcing rents up to a level only affordable by national chains. However, I would take issue with this to an extent. Property values have risen so much in recent years, that rents need to increase in order for the landlord to see a reasonable return on their investment. If a property is worth 100k and the rental income is 7k per annum that’s a yield of 7% – better than the bank will give you. If the property is worth 250k then the rent needs to be around 15k in order to equal the bank base lending rate.
However, looking around me, I see a far different reason for the demise of the small, independent bookshop. It is the rise and rise of the charity shop. Landlords love them – let’s face it, an organisation the size of Oxfam aren’t going to default on the rent! And the high rents required of these charities are affordable because they pay little if any business rates (around 80% exemption I am told), they get their stock for nothing and the vast majority of their staff come free.
Certain areas – the affluent, middle class neighbourhoods – are particularly attractive to charities as they are a good source of quality donations and also because there is no stigma attached to shopping in the better-presented shops. Indeed, it shows how right-on we are. And for the bibliophiles amongst us, charity shops help to feed our compulsion!
Stockbridge in Edinburgh is a prime example of this. On the fringes of the terribly posh New Town and popular with young professional and yummy mummies, it has the usual range of delis, wine merchant, Starbucks, florist, a clothes shop and a smattering of those shops that sell nice-but-useless gifty things. It also has an increasing number of charity shops – I counted 12 earlier today – in the space of about 300 yards. This includes two dedicated bookshops and a record shop. Morningside on the south side of the city, and with a similarly affluent if slightly older demographic, has about eight in a similar distance, including two dedicated bookshops.
Rents in these areas are astronomic. There is a tatty shop unit on Morningside Road, formerly a children’s clothes shop, and with approx 260 square feet of shop space, a loo and a small store available at a rent of around 15k pa. Another further up towards Waitrose and slightly larger was being marketed at 25k. The result of all this is that ‘proper’ businesses – those that have to pay business rates, and actually buy their stock and pay their staff – are pushed out.
Take us for example. I have always loved Persephone’s shop in London’s Lamb’s Conduit Street with its arrangement of shop at the front and offices behind and we would love to open a similar shop. We could move our office there (I would love not to have an office at home!) and in the front we could stock our books, plus a few hundred titles that were (to use Persephone’s phrase) the children’s books we wish we’d published. There would be storage and space for packing at the back and enough space that we could have the odd evening event to launch a book or whatever.
Stockbridge is the perfect location for this type of shop/office but even if we could find premises that were viable, how do we compete against two charity bookshops with the advantages that they have? Perhaps, in order that our neighbourhoods don’t become dominated by the voluntary sector, we need to bring in planning rules so that, just as local authority permission is needed for shops to be converted into coffee shops, so should there be limits placed on the number of charity shops in an area?
Sorry for rambling on – well done if you stuck with me to the end. In the meantime, if anyone knows of suitable premises do let me know!
A pleasant place to live, with high house prices, becomes the victim of its own success. In our town three shops in a row are empty, the owners forced out by high rents. Costa and Julian Graves have moved in, further pushing up rents. Our only decent independent butcher and deli has been replaced by an optician’s. Meanwhile the great Waitrose controversy rolls on and on. It’s becoming a nice place to be if you could live on spectacles and ‘gifts’. We do still have an independent bookshop and a SHBS but I don’t know how long they can last. A Fidra shop here would be lovely…
Vanessa,
I take your point about the ‘power’ of the charity shops vis-a-vis the smaller independent retailers in particular, and I certainly agree that Stockbridge would be perfect for the sort of shop you envisage. But, if Persephone can do it, why not Fidra? Edinburgh needs this sort of enterprise. The ’serious’ book-buyers would support you just as cheese-lovers go to Ian Mellis as well as/instead of the supermarket. There must be a way for it to be viable. Don’t rule it out!
Glad you’re so enthusiastic Karen! It seems I’ve found my Saturday girl, now all I need are premises…
No I think Edinburgh has all the fun and is much too cold, we need you here in Devon! Tavistock just crying out for something niche and specialist like this. People already travel here from all over because the town is so lovely, think how much lovelier it would be with a Fidra shop, you know it makes sense, Edinburgh far too crowded in August, no, no won’t do at all.Saturday girl available.
In Australia, charity shops are exempt from little things like tax too … No wonder some high streets only have charity shops. Apart from the fact that I once found a copy of Mara Kay’s Masha in a charity shop for 50c, I loathe the places!
Thanks for bringing this up Vanessa. We have exactly the same problem here in Skipton on the edge of the Yorkshire Dales. The better known charity shops are themselves behaving as homgenous chainstores now – every Oxfam looks the same and seems to stock more new things than the traditional recycled domestic bits and bobs. Skipton, which has very high property prices, is awash with chain charity shops and is no place to site the bookshop that we’d love to have. Charity shops have changed and it is really time that local planning changed to take that into account.
Looking at charity shops in this way is entirely negative. The more book shops in an area, the more synergy. People will come to an area because it has a number of bookshops. Readership increases: people who might never visit a bookshop are exposed to books in charity shops. Also it’s not about competing with charity shops. It’s about specialising in a way that they can’t; Oxfam does not select its books – it pretty much takes whats offered to it. And plenty of their stock is just awful. Innovation is required all the time. You can’t just say, there I’ve set up a bookshop and that’s that. Also you can sell on the entire web, which has about a billion potential customers.
Cheer up!