The Bookseller.com

6th September 2010

Martin Latham is manager of Waterstone's Canterbury.

Something in the air

29.07.10

Anthony Horowitz speculated recently that only old geezers such as him think that high street bookshops have a future. I beg to differ. My son, a digital marketer, umbilically attached to Apple, is sure that bookshops will survive. Oldies, in awe of digitisation, fear Armageddon.

How will shops survive? Through range, recommendation, cafés, events and wonderful staff, but also through something less definable, something which festivals are now being judged on. Atmosphere has made Glastonbury supreme, from early on, when John Peel marvelled: "Nine posts with coloured cloths fluttering from them—why?  This mysterious pointlessness makes Glastonbury succeed." Latitude, a rising festival star, is totemically characterful.

As proof that bookshops have this atmos, think how you buy non-essential books from shops which turn you on. I have done this at Harvard Bookstore, Boston, Village Voice, Paris and Waterstone's Oban, to get a souvenir, a chunk of those shops' indefinable something.

Atmosphere is invisible but here are five things which contribute to it:

1) History. Cambridge has Britain's oldest bookshop, Byron shopped at Hatchards, Bath is where Tim Waterstone's son drove his Harley through the shop, Bournemouth branch is where a bookseller lost it and, crouching behind the till, served customers all day via two glove puppets, Rizzoli's New York is in "The Maltese Falcon". Shops do nothing with their history, but customers love it. We should all have a history-board for customers, because we sell narratives.

2) Ghosts and poltergeists. Discarnate entities love bookshops. Ask any bookseller and, sheepishly, out come the stories. Waterstone's security people deny all knowledge of the tape which shows locked doors open and close silently, not setting off the alarm, but they have it. Ironically it was a now-senior auditor who saw, in another branch, entire shelves full of books placed neatly on the floor. My own shop is awash with psycho-kinetic activity. Unverifiable tales, but customers love 'em.

3) Aroma. A nubile flame-haired customer lowered her voice as if confessing to a perversion: "I come in for the smell, I love it," a confession I have often heard.

4) Chat."The Public Sphere". Habermas' concept refers to his belief that the Enlightenment is not over. It is now carried on in unofficial, informal spaces like cafés and bookshops, successors of the Salons.

5) As humans with a heritage of animal reaction, we conduct intuitive psychic audits on our spaces. There exists an imper-sonal but spiritual resonance in places, pre-religious, something the Polynesians called mana, the Romans numen or, "the stuff magic is made from". Bookshops, old and new, indie or chain, all have it. Customers notice it quicker than sofas, coffee, bric-a-brac.

(iPads lack these five things.)