Up your street

10.10.11 | Martin Latham

I've run my shop for 21 years and I still don't know what's going on. By this, I mean that St Margaret's Street, Canterbury—like every other bookshop's street—has its own elusive calendar of events which drive sales. Here, ringed by ancient woods and orchards, it is mushroom and fruit-harvesting season.  

Each year, as an ex-Londoner, this takes me by surprise. Big though Super Thursday is, I can make more money that week with an enticing autumn window and piles of Food for Free, fungi books and jam-making books. I have only realised this in the past few years. Similarly, as a sea-girt county, we get asked a lot each summer for sea fishing books. Pagan festivals attract groups of jingling morris dancers, whom I could entice in with a Wiccan window.

After 18 years I realised that a "market day" causes a weekly footfall spike. Parkour books abound, but each spring falconry books are asked for. And I am still unprepared for the sales surge of graduation in the cathedral, when loads of dressed-up parents in celebratory mode pack the streets.

Another event worth preparing for is the annual Euro-Food Fair, when police control access roads into the city and shops are flooded with punters high on Belgian beer. An Anglican conference brings in hundreds of bible-hungry African clergy, but have I asked the Archbishop (a regular) when the hell it is? No. Summer tourists have been my biggest missed opportunity, and only this year I stocked up on postcards and installed a very successful deprecatory section on Britishness.  

The book industry pushes aside the local calendar because, increasingly, it succumbs to the big obvious national occasions like Father's Day (while ignoring Poetry Day, Gay Pride and International Children's Day). Wall-to-wall Christmas decor depresses those who still just want a bookshop. Father's Day alienates those who (like me) are not mad about cars or sport. The books that publishers and retailers push for Mother's Day imply that mums are in a permanent vegetative state. Valentine's Day needs to be contained. One of my (now departed) booksellers blew her top when implementing a shopfloor Valentine's display, dumping the pink cardboard hearts on the floor and shouting: "Why am I doing this? I haven't had sex for six years!"

The problem is that 80% of publishers are situated within four miles of Piccadilly Circus, but most bookshops are provincial. I have in-depth conversations about pig and hen-keeping books, and beekeeping is no fad here, it's a permanent section. On my cycle to work I hear larks singing, yellowhammers reeling and buzzards mewing. Two other managers I know have seen bitterns and goshawks before work. The lark ascendeth not over Vauxhall Bridge Road. I am dreading the Olympics: a tsunami of overpublishing which will threaten the beekeeping section.

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