The problem with most bookshops these days is that they are almost entirely pointless. The largest among them can't hope to stock more than a tiny fraction of the books on sale in the world, while their online competitors stock everything. As such, the only thing that can make a bookshop worth the space it occupies is the quality of the fraction that they select.
So many bookshops - independents as well as majors - choose to stock the tiny fraction at the bulbous head of the demand curve, presumably in the hope that the public will be so in love with the idea of their businesses that they'll shun the urge to pick up their copy of The Hungry Vampire Games at Tesco or on amazon and romantically saunter into a bookshop instead. It's the kind of thinking that sees To Let signs replace Cardboard cutouts of Hogwarts in shopfronts across the world.
The only thing to do, really, is to treat your choice of books as the beating artistic heart of your business. Stocking a bookshop should be an act of curation - designed to sell people books they didn't know they wanted when they walked into your building. It is in this that Much Ado excels.
If you can read at secondary school level, I defy you to spend half an hour in this shop without finding something to covet. The selection of new books is a marvel of discriminatory taste - the second hand section plentiful and engrossing. Buy a gift and they will wrap it for you more efficiently and more prettily than any package you've ever seen.
It looks quaint, it looks old-fashioned, it looks like the past - but it isn't. If there is to be such a thing as a future for indpendent bookshops, then this shop is it. Long may it continue. read more