The ghost of Christmas past

06.01.12 | Matt Taylor

Christmas 2011 is over and booksellers are already busy with New Year promotions, sales, sorting out returns, doing the accounts and planning for the year ahead. 

Christmas came late, as we say every year, but thankfully as reported in The Bookseller, the last week was surprisingly busy for many independents. Our comparable numbers for December were always going to be helped by not having the awful weather of 2010 to contend with, but here in Chepstow we were also aided by the schools breaking up eight days before Christmas, an attractive range of high quality “independent”-type books, much better delivery service this year (for us, though not for all) and books' continued resilience as excellent presents.

In terms of books bought it was a rather nostalgic "ghost of Christmas past" with customers clutching Stella Gibbons’ 1940 Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm and Dylan Thomas’ 1955 A Child’s Christmas in Wales as stocking-fillers or to read themselves over the holidays. Our top two newly written bestsellers went back into the 19th century with the biography of Dickens by Claire Tomalin and P D James’ Death Comes to Pemberley.  Alongside this, serious biography, popular literary fiction, cookery and accessible history made up the bulk of our Christmas sales.

Even in the world of Twitter and Facebook it was the press end-of-year reviews and the radio that had the most profound effect on what our customers were buying.  The biggest example of this was the reading on BBC Radio 4 in the week before Christmas of Mark Forsyth’s The Etymologicon (Icon). Such was the effect of Hugh Dennis at 9.45am that every phone call I took on the Tuesday morning was enquiring about whether we had stock of the book. It is an original and interesting read and an attractive object in its own right, making it an ideal quirky gift.

A change for us was running events well into December, which we did with Sir Ranulph Fiennes on the 12th December and Quentin Letts on the 15th. As well as both being fascinating and highly entertaining the upside of this was that we sold many more copies per customer than we normally would, as customers took the opportunity to buy signed dedicated copies as presents for friends and family. Signed copies were then quickly sold in the bookshop.

Many independents then will have gone to bed on Christmas Eve, quietly pleased that this Christmas was a lot better than they had feared. However with the pressures and changes in the retail sector at the moment, especially the numbers of e-readers given as presents, most will be looking at the ghost of Christmas future with trepidation.
 

• blog
• Christmas
• Home
• Independents
• Matt Taylor
• Retail