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Two academics with a background in bookselling are launching the Bookselling Research Network, an organisation bringing booksellers, researchers and associations together to celebrate and explore bookselling past, present and future.
Supported by the Booksellers Association and the Books Council of Wales, the project is the brainchild of Dr Sam Rayner, director of the Centre for Publishing at UCL, who previously worked as a bookseller in Hammicks and Blackwell's, and Dr Eben Muse, senior lecturer at Bangor University's Stephen Colclough Centre for the History and Culture of the Book, who is also the co-owner of the Parnassus Book Service bookshop on Cape Cod.
As well as showing the the growing academic awareness of the importance of bookshops and bookselling, the Network is intended to help facilitate practical training, research projects, events, and "a living archive" of bookselling-related information. It will also work closely with organisations like the Booksellers Association and the Books Council of Wales to support strategic plans and encourage knowledge exchange initiatives.
Speaking with The Bookseller, Rayner said it was time that the importance of bookselling was recognised in academia as much as the history of books and publishing.
"More and more I’ve become aware that bookselling is missed out of all the research and the publicity and the talks within academia. It’s all about book history, and publishing history is becoming quite popular, but bookselling history and what booksellers do and their importance in the whole thing is mostly overlooked," she said.
"I spent some time at Bangor University in Wales; Ebon’s family have a second generation secondhand bookshop in Cape Cod, so he has a very personal relationship to bookselling... We got talking with the Meryl Halls at the BA and realised, setting up a more formal arrangement that brought together the people who are interested in researching bookshops and the people who were still in bookselling and all those people who are connected to it, we have an opportunity to push the word how important bookselling is as part of the book trade circuit."
Rayner said the Network would be focused on capturing bookselling history and making it more visible "because it is disappearing". This is something she is also working to address by writing a book about post-Second World War female booksellers of London, a project she begun after learning about Una Dillon, the founder and owner of Dillons, whose plaque, according to Rayne, is buried behind one of the shelves at Waterstones Gower Street.
"Everybody’s heard of Christine Foyle but not everyone has heard of Una Dillon and the amazing things she did for booksellers. She literally is hidden behind the bookshelves in that shop. [I realised] there were all these strong women but their histories are lost. Even trying to get the history of Dillons as a book chain, there isn’t an archive. This has all disappeared. [The Network] is trying to capture some of those memories and some of that understanding so we don’t lose that completely."
Membership of the Network currently requires no membership fees or other commitments. It seeks to appeal to anyone with an interest in research into bookselling, both in the UK and internationally, and already the organisation has academic members in the US, Japan, the United Arab Emirates, and Colombia, as well as in Europe and the UK.
Ultimately the goal is to become "an online hub for news, research, queries, and information about bookshops, booksellers, and bookselling in the UK and across the world", complete with events on bookselling and a resource bank of materials.
Rayner said: "We thought we can’t wait any longer [to launch]. There’s such a lot of talk at the moment about the value of bookshops, we decided maybe in fact this is the right time to just say ‘well here we are'. We are totally passionate about supporting booksellers because we’ve been there ourselves and we have been booksellers... We hope to create an active, supportive community of collaborators, partners and researchers, but as with any good bookshop, anyone is very welcome to just come in and browse!"
The website is live, and new members can join here. It also has a Twitter account @BooksellingRes1.