posted on 22 Dec 2020

Bookshop Tours of Britain by Louise Boland

We can all dream. My personal fantasy is to organise a tour of the USA, hopping from bookshop to bookshop; maybe a trip using Highway 66 as the road map, with stops and minor diversions built in to trawl the bookshops.

All good book-obsessives have the ability to travel in hope – the hope that we’re going to drop into the perfect second hand shop crammed with rarities in pristine condition and available for absurdly low prices. It’s what keeps us all going and what drives the compulsion to drop in to any shop over and over again because, after all, you just never know what’s come in since you were last there.

In these days of pandemic and lockdown, our dreams may have become a bit more modest. A trip to any bookshop will do. In fact, bookshops just surviving these terrible times is something I might even settle for. But it wouldn’t be human not to think ahead and imagine how wonderful it would be to go back to that time when we could travel freely, enter bookshops without worrying about social distancing and not have to wear those irksome masks.

In preparation for that glorious time, get yourself a copy of Louise Boland’s delightful Bookshop Tours of Britain. Boland, who had established a small independent publishing house decided she needed to get out on the road to meet her future booksellers and so began her tour of the country in 2018.

It’s true that books of this kind are always at risk of becoming out-of-date almost from the moment they are published because businesses come and go, move location or new ones pop up without notice. At some point in the future this sumptuously produced guide will probably be an historical document of a British bookshop community that no longer exists but for the coming few years, even if not every entry will survive the ravages of time and pandemic, enough of the infrastructure will be there to make it a handbook any self-respecting bibliophile will want.

The organisation of the material is perfect – Britain divided into regional ‘tours’ complete with maps, colour photographs of the shops (inside and out) and the indispensible addresses and contact numbers of all the featured premises. There’s a sort of short profile essay to accompany each regional map and suggested stopping points - but it has to be said that it’s the photographs that do an awful lot of the heavy lifting.

This book came into my house like a ray of sunshine and I’ve already spent far too much time ploughing through the entries plotting and re-plotting the trips I’m going to take next summer (fingers crossed and vaccination willing). But it’s also lovely to retrace the trips and visits you’ve already made and luxuriate in the memories of all those good times you had before we became prisoners of a wretched virus.

It’s £12-£15 well spent, trust me.

 

Terry Potter

December 2020