Strength
in Numbers Mark
Maddox shares his thoughts about Atherstone Book Town's leaflet and suggests a
more cooperative approach, which could equally benefit other communities of bookshops.
I doubt that
anyone would disagree that James Hanna, of Blaenavon
Booktown fame, has a special talent as a publicist, but he is surely missing
a trick in his new booktown venture in Atherstone, Warwickshire. The basic requirement
for a successful bookshop must be to get people in through the door, ‘footfall’
in business terminology. Attracting
people to Atherstone then, and its fledgling booktown adventure, is surely of
paramount importance. Atherstone Booktown
was slow to take off, with opening dates being put back more than once for various
reasons, but eventually secondhand bookshops were indeed opened in the town. Publicity
material includes a flyer with the proud declaration, ‘A Booktown is Born’ boldly
displayed at the top. Then below this are photographs of the two bookshops that
so far comprise Atherstone Booktown, (namely Throckmorton’s, and The Atherstone
Bookshop), and a little blurb about each one. Throckmorton’s sells books on a
range of subjects. The Atherstone Bookshop is the headquarters of the booktown
venture, and similarly stocks a good range of books. There
is a third outlet selling secondhand books though, The Old Red Lion Hotel, whose
proprietors are supporters of the Booktown Project. In the King’s Library room
in the hotel a large bookcase covers one wall. This is filled with a selection
of books on sound, interesting subjects like travel, history, and biographies,
there is no room for coffee table fodder here! The King’s Library opened shortly
before the other two shops, but is missing from the flyer. Why this should be
I do not know, but its inclusion on the promotional flyer would have increased
the number of outlets on there to three. With
such low numbers one would think that more outlets to laud would be desirable,
just two shops does not sound like much of a booktown. All booktowns will of course
be compared by book-buying punters with Hay-on-Wye. This may be unfair, nothing
on that scale may be possible in today’s world of the World Wide Web, but regardless
of scale the set up at Hay is surely the tried and tested formula to aspire to.
The publicity material for Hay includes a town map showing the locations of all
the bookshops, and then very sensibly pointers to any other secondhand bookshops
in neighbouring towns and villages. The result is to convince would-be visitors
that Hay is indeed the centre of secondhand book heaven. Something
similar could have been done with the Atherstone leaflet. There is, just 4 miles
from Atherstone, Astley Book Farm. With over 50,000 titles in an ever-changing
stock, this is the largest outlet for secondhand books in the midlands. There
are antiquarian books, natural history, travel, geography, science fiction, general
fiction, a huge children’s section, virtually every subject imaginable is covered.
A pointer to this would have surely enhanced the appeal of Atherstone’s promotional
literature. Just
three miles to the north of Atherstone in the small town of Polesworth is another
gem of a shop, Chester’s. This caters for the more academic booklover, with a
wide range of subjects, and also a beguiling array of maps, prints and mounts
on a similar wide range of subjects. This is a shop that truly is a browser’s
wonderland. Finally
a new development in Atherstone is the opening of another secondhand bookshop,
a charity shop for St Giles Hospice. Only selling books and staffed by volunteers
this has many books on popular subjects such as gardening, sport, fiction, etc,
and very reasonably priced. So it would seem an opportunity has gone begging.
There are actually
six excellent outlets for secondhand books centered on Atherstone, not just two.
A flyer mentioning all of these would make Atherstone seem so much more of an
attraction, and be more likely to tempt people to visit the place. Indeed, an
argument could be made for a secondhand book day out in North Warwickshire, visiting
those six outlets. I
would suggest the following itinerary. Start at Chester’s in the morning, then
go to St Giles’ before having lunch at The Red Lion (both establishments are in
Long Street, Atherstone), in the King’s Library of course! After lunch a perambulation
round to the market square to take in Throckmorton’s and The Atherstone Bookshop,
before travelling the short distance to Astley Book Farm to finish the day off.
Astley and Chester’s both have map directions on the Internet. I have tried the
above route out recently and it certainly makes for a full and fun day out. Mark
Maddox
12.01.06
|
