The Borders school of bookselling
Borders wasn't always the bad guy of bookshops; my quest for stockists for Smoke magazine sheds some light on its demise
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- guardian.co.uk, Monday 30 November 2009 13.00 GMT
- Article history
"Sorry, but there's not enough about Kew in it." Hmm. I do wonder if stocking books only about Kew – novels, biographies, a delightfully minimalist range of Lonely Planets – isn't a smidge… well, niche. But that's the thing about independent bookshops: they're independent. Or, if you prefer, bloody-minded. Which isn't, in itself, a bad thing – and at least the Kew Bookshop was perfectly pleasant when explaining why stocking Smoke, our magazine about London, was such an utterly fantastical proposition; they didn't, for instance, refuse even to touch the proffered copy, and simply intone "it won't sell" until I left, as the Bolingbroke Bookshop did; or, like the Kennington Bookshop, inform me that "nobody round here" was interested in that sort of thing, despite my protestations that our thing was produced just two streets away. But if independent bookshops aren't willing to support local publishers – even on a sale-or-return, no-cash-upfront, no-risk basis – then why, as customers, should we support them? What's their USP? Is "not being Borders" enough?
"Yes," you cry, "Borders was the epitome of corporate evil! There was a Starbucks on the mezzanine, two-for-one on the Jamie Olivers and a Dalmatian puppy farm behind Paperchase!" Well, yes … but Smoke wouldn't exist today if Malcolm Hopkins, who was in charge of periodicals at Borders' Oxford Street store when we began, hadn't thought the magazine – and dozens like it – worth supporting. Whenever a new issue came out, we'd take him 350 copies on the 159 bus, and he'd position them subversively among the Grazias and Worlds of Dogs. But, when we breezed in with issue #10, we found no Hopkins, just a surly goth skulking in Esoterica. "He's gone," she said. "Gone?" we said. "Why?" "Dunno. Probably didn't like the uniform." Half of issue #10 came back as returns. Or the covers did.
It's true that Hopkins never struck me as a name-badge kinda guy, but I think there was more to it, as his departure coincided with the arrival of a letter from Borders HQ: in future, it said, could we please stop supplying the shop directly, and employ a distributor.
We'd heard all this before from Waterstone's, where corporate identity had long since trumped regional whim: head office, not local managers, ordered stock, and independent publishers weren't allowed to have accounts. Just recently, its Piccadilly store had valiantly attempted to carry Smoke, but been defeated by The System; it couldn't accept that I existed, they said, meekly returning 40 unsellable, possibly imaginary, copies.
Consumed with existential doubt, I caved in and hired a distributor; we'd get less money, the shops would get less money – ironically, lack of money apparently underlies Borders' recent demise – and the magazines would get left underneath a dripping radiator because we wouldn't be there to cough and point BUT, on the plus side, you'd now be able to find a copy of Smoke in Waterstone's, Piccadilly: yes, once we'd sent it to our distributor's warehouse in Hackney, and they'd sent it to Waterstone's central distribution hub in Burton-on-Trent, and they'd sent it to Piccadilly, you'd be able to pop in, pick it up, think "Why is it so tatty?", and decide to see if your local bookshop had one instead.
And they, of course, would tell you that people like you don't want that sort of thing…
- guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2009
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