My big Birmingham bookshop crawl: why booksellers are suddenly thriving

When Sarah Mullen was asked to set up a children’s book festival in a leafy suburb of Birmingham in 2012, she couldn’t find an independent bookseller to run the bookstall. “So we all rolled up our sleeves and did it ourselves,” she says. Pregnant with her third child, she had recently given up her job as a solicitor to work for the Bournville Village Trust. Mullen’s task was to set up the Bournville BookFest, which ran for 10 years before being brought to a halt by the Covid pandemic. But far from accepting defeat, she rolled up her sleeves once again and “pivoted the whole thing into a bookshop”. Two years on, the Bookshop on the Green is thriving – a living rebuttal to the once widely held idea that the digital era meant certain death for the neighbourhood bookstore.

When I visit early on a Friday morning, a turquoise vintage Smith Corona typewriter holds centre stage in the Bookshop on the Green. Beside it stands Bradley Taylor, a poet whose job is to write poems on demand for anyone who asks. He has composed a lot of Batman and football poems for the children who pile in on Saturdays, he says, before sitting down to tap one out for me about the joy of bookshops. In the multitasking tradition of small retailers, Taylor also works in the shop. He made his cosplay debut last month as the Gruffalo, in a sold-out storytelling session on the village green, as part of a week celebrating Birmingham’s independent bookshops.

This is my first stop on a bookshop crawl that will take in five very different stores within a 13-mile radius of the centre of Birmingham. It is a qualitative survey inspired by surprising news that, at a time when a lot of shops are struggling amid a cost of living crisis that has followed hot on the heels of a pandemic, bookselling is thriving. In January, Waterstones posted a £42.1m profit after tax for the financial year ending April 2022 – up from £2.9m in 2020/21 and £19.7m in 2019/20. Meanwhile, the number of independent booksellers in the UK and Ireland soared to a 10-year high last year. According to the Booksellers Association, after six years of consecutive growth, there are now 1,072 independent stores – up from 867 in 2016.

This is still a fair way off the numbers operating at the start of the millennium, but that was before ebooks and online retailing took hold. In the dark days of 2009, bookshops were reported to be closing at a rate of two a week, resulting in a 27% reduction in a decade. By 2011, mutterings about the death of the book had broken into a roar, with US bookseller Barnes & Noble reporting that it now sold three times as many digital books as all formats of physical books combined, while Amazon claimed it had crossed the tipping point, with 242 ebooks sold for every 100 hardbacks. Scottish author Ewan Morrison, in an emotional Edinburgh book festival debate, asked: “Will books, as we know them, come to an end?” Answering his own question, he said: “Yes, absolutely, within 25 years the digital revolution will bring about the end of paper books.”

The apocalypse has not yet come to pass. Mullen says: “I never thought in a month of Sundays that Kindles would replace the experience of curling up with a book. Bookshops are well known to have a halo effect: they draw people into an area, so there’s enormous loyalty – and especially after the pandemic when booksellers moved heaven and earth to get books to people, by bicycle if necessary. Customers will come into the shop and show me a book on Amazon and say they want to buy it from me, even though there’s no way I could match the price.”

My second stop is four miles from Bournville in the very different area of Bearwood, at the southern end of Smethwick. Nestled between an African-Caribbean grocer and a beauty salon, the Bear Bookshop opens on to an expanse of practical blue vinyl flooring flanked by walls adorned with the candy colours of children’s books. If Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory were to be recreated in paper and glue, it would look like this.

A large play table of cut-up spaghetti sits in the centre of the room, with a pair of mauve children’s scissors sticking out of the gloopy mess. The shop hosts morning storytelling sessions and today’s, which has just finished, was about Rapunzel. These are the remnants of her hair, says founder Jenny McCann, a former English teacher who left her job at a West Bromwich secondary school to set up a shop that sold the sorts of books her three small children liked to read.

As a teacher, she was aware of the lifelong social and economic advantages that an early love of reading gives children. According to an international study across 31 countries, having a home stocked with physical books adds to that advantage. “It’s easy for me to find books for my children, because I run a bookshop, but it’s hard for many parents to know where to start. I’m not so much selling books as selling reading,” she says.

As we talk, a young mother works her way through a shelf of push-button books, filling the shop with tweeting and woofing, while her toddler plays happily in a tipi by the front window. A woman bustles in to pick up a loaf of bread from the back of the shop, which combines an arts and crafts area with a collection point for loaves baked by local refugee women.

McCann opened the Bear Bookshop to queues of Christmas shoppers in December 2020. “We had an amazing December, then had to close until April 2021,” she says. The shop’s stop-start beginning has been compounded by the cost of living crisis in a largely working-class area. “But we offer a lot more to the community than just the transaction,” says McCann. “So many shops are really stressful with toddlers, so I wanted somewhere with space for pushchairs which parents could browse in and which children wouldn’t want to leave.”

My third stop is at Blue Sheep Books in Wednesbury, a former steel town that sits among a coil of dual carriageways in the Black Country. It is a drizzly lunchtime, and Sorina Marinescu and her husband, John, are playing a game of Exploding Kittens in the front of their shop, as the smell of coffee wafts from the back. They have only been open a fortnight in their new space. It’s considerably bigger than their previous one, though still compact, with one wall of new books and another of the secondhand ones that they also sell online. They are happy to swap these with customers who can’t afford to buy new books. They also offer a place to sit around and play board games over coffee brewed on the premises.

It is a nail-biting time for a couple who began bookselling with a single box of secondhand books on eBay, but soon found they had to expand to a storage unit. During the pandemic, they experimented with pop-up stalls around the West Midlands, only taking the plunge to full-time commitment to a bricks and mortar outlet when Marinescu, who is Romanian, was made redundant from her job placing international students in UK universities.

They pay £650 a month for their unit, which is on a five-year lease. It is a huge risk, they admit, but they are buoyed up by the appreciation locally for what they are bringing to the area. On advice from their customers, they also sell Warhammer merchandise, and are planning to expand into Pokémon cards. Local history is particularly popular, with a consignment of books about King Alfred’s daughter, Aethelflaed – who once ruled the Midlands kingdom of Mercia – selling out in a week.

The book trade has been incredibly supportive, says Marinescu. “The reps really get indie bookshops in a way that surprised us. They offer good terms, and are really keen to support us however they can.” As we talk, on an old leather sofa, her email pings with confirmation of their first celebrity author event, with the novelist Liz Hyder. They are so excited that I half expect them to crack open a bottle of the Birmingham-brewed craft ale that they have been sent ahead of their next experiment – a beer and books evening.

The owner of my next port of call, 11 miles away in Aston, is Valentina Alexander, who is “south London born and bred”, and first arrived in the Midlands to do a PhD at the University of Warwick. She also cut her teeth with pop-up stalls around the country, and for a while had an outlet in a local shopping mall. Her customers come from far and wide for a natter and to immerse themselves in the culture of Birmingham’s only black bookshop.

MyBookbasket is part of the Legacy Centre of Excellence, a new black-owned cultural hub on the site of what used to be the Drum arts centre. It is the smallest shop so far, a glorious magpie’s nest so crammed with artefacts that you have to move carefully so as not to knock anything over. Alexander, a charismatic woman who also lectures in theology and is a writer herself, sells everything from locally made and styled black dolls, to essential oils and African headdresses in brilliant colours. But her first love – and the centre of her business – has always been books. She says: “I started from having a young family and wanting to find resources for them that weren’t available, so I focused on books that had images of black children. Then I started to sell adult books that I liked.”

There is no Toni Morrison or Akala in stock at the moment, because their books fly out as soon as they arrive, but the poet Yomi Sode, who was shortlisted for the TS Eliot prize, is there, alongside Trevor Noah’s South African memoir Born a Crime. Packed though her shelves are, Alexander is happy to find space for self-published books that come out of the community. The youngest author she currently stocks is EJ Nembhard, who was seven years old when she collaborated with her mum on the picture book I Am in Love with My Locs!. Nearby is Afroboy: Mr Beaker’s Goggles, by another local author and cultural activist, Yelitza Smith.

MyBookbasket could hardly be more different from my final port of call, in Digbeth, a cool inner-city area of Birmingham where industrial workshops have been replaced by business startups and artists’ studios. With a handy interconnecting door to a vegan cafe, into which it spills over for events, Voce Books is a temple to independent bookselling, with titles arranged largely by publisher. One shelf is dedicated to the austere blue livery of the nine-year-old indie imprint Fitzcarraldo Editions, which published its current bestseller, Porn: An Oral History, by Polly Barton.

Founders Clive and Maria Judd met while working for Foyles bookshop in London, and they both have second jobs – Maria, who is Italian, works in theatre publishing, and Clive is a director and playwright. “We’re very honest about that,” they say. “It’s to ensure that we can run the shop entirely the way we want to, while not putting ourselves at risk of financial meltdown. We wanted to build a book space that felt entirely modern – not just in aesthetic, but in outlook, too – a space with a flavour of the best European bookshops we’ve been to.”

Meryl Halls, managing director of the Booksellers Association, says the pandemic has forced bookshops to diversify, with many moving into online sales and becoming neighbourhood hubs. Their strong sense of purpose and community has convinced more people that bookselling is an attractive and viable career choice. However, she also sounds a note of caution: “External pressures on bookshop businesses continue to be relentless, and with recession, inflation, labour shortages and massive cost increases across the board, bookshops continue to need support.”

At the forefront of the expansionist throng is Waterstones, which last year opened 13 new shops, including one in Lichfield, in Staffordshire, to add to the 16 it already operated throughout the West Midlands. Kate Skipper, chief operating officer of Waterstones, praised UK publishers for responding to the potential challenge of e-reading by raising the production values of books. “Bots just can’t compete with a human connection,” she says. “We see the enduring popularity of bookshops as testament to an ongoing thirst for physical books and a demand from readers for recommendations from booksellers.”

What, I wonder, does Morrison – the Scottish catastrophist – make of the positive outlook suggested by my Birmingham bookshop crawl? He says: “The question is: can indie bookstores build up a big enough alternative network to support indie book publishers? That would be of value. Let’s see that happen.”

Given the dedication of independent booksellers in the microcosm of the Midlands, it seems as if they are giving it their best shot.