From cowardly retreat to foolhardy advance
From cowardly retreat to foolhardy advance – my tortuous journey to new premises
by Francis Sheppard, proprietor
Last April, after five days among the woods, valleys and seascapes of North Wales’s Lleyn peninsula, I came home to the news that the rent was to be doubled. Not that the existing rent was excessive – it was just that the difference meant the exclusion of the present part-time staff, and thus the opportunities for progress through their work.
There were prevarications throughout the summer, awful to behold, thoroughly bipolar, quite unsettling for staff and supporters. But in the end it seemed I couldn’t do other than carry on.
Retirement, advocated by my younger family, would have meant an existence as a ‘gentleman of leisure’ in Brierley Hill, talking away about twelve years of trading books. But there would have been proper time spent with them, travel perhaps, but most of all, reading. In two panicky retreats, all this seemed like freedom.
Or I could have taken a lesser number of rooms at reduced rent. That would have allowed for online trading only. Like drinking non-alcoholic beer. It’s the joy of people through the place, hearing about their deep dives into a book they never thought they’d read, and the commonality that customers find through a bookshop, that make the activity of bookselling worthwhile.
What did not change, over these six months of dilemma, was the occupancy of my head by various visions of the Fountain Arcade premises. At one time I would see ‘the florist’s shop’ as small and incommodious. At another, the pivotal position at the top of Stone Square, past and future centre of cultural Dudley Town, seemed to demand a bookshop.
Over the most recent summer there were shocks of bad news. The closure of Brooke’s Bar and Bistro, where we had held the monthly Poetry Breakfast and hosted Liz Berry. The charges raised on parking. The uncertain funding of the Metro line all the way to Brierley Hill.
But I had paid a fortune in solicitors’ fees for a ten-year lease, a lease that I continually recoiled in horror from signing. Maybe it was that – paying thousands for nothing – that prompted the eventual leap into the dark. By that time I had grown fatalistic – whether I took the shop or not there would doubtless be pain, some pleasure perhaps. But of the two available choices, there seemed more adventure in going ahead with it. Once done, I did not worry anymore. Increasingly I had the sense of the property being fit for a number of legitimate uses, bookselling apart. All to be done under conditions of goldfish-bowl visibility. So far from the hidden rooms of the Old Place.
If there is to be one over-riding aim, it is newness. Although the online trade in antiquarian books will go on, it will do so at home, or in the tenebrous spaces above the new premises. This will be a bookshop that promotes the best of contemporary culture. Of which it is your job, as customers and supporters, to keep me informed.