The ‘Royal’ bookshop that’s defying the odds
Jake Kerridge on how one London store’s unique strategy could inspire others in the sector
It’s the grimmest of times for independent bookshops. A burst of innovation at the start of the first lockdown in March, with many shops moving to online selling for the first time, has kept most of the UK’S indies ticking over, if far from thriving. But now a second lockdown slap bang in the middle of what should be their busiest period of the year leaves many of them in real trouble.
Indie bookshops don’t necessarily have to lie down and die, though. I spoke to Nicky Dunne, chairman of Heywood Hill. The Mayfair shop that sells both new and antiquarian books has led the way in finding new business models in the course of a decade that has seen traditional bookselling beleaguered by any number of existential threats.
Most booksellers I know are distraught at the prospect of having to let staff go, but Dunne barely has time to talk to me as he’s busy interviewing applicants for a post in the shop’s subscriptions department. “We’ve had 100 applications – that’s a sign of the times,” he tells me.
He is heartbroken that the timing of this second lockdown puts so many shops in jeopardy, and is determined to keep Heywood Hill a going concern.
“My view is that here in Mayfair we have so many advantages – we’ve got a name, we’ve been around for 80 years, we’re located in one of the most prosperous districts in one of the world’s most prosperous cities – it’s really our duty to make sure that the literary ecology continues to exist in the centre of London, especially when so many much braver souls are persevering with maintaining bookshops in far-flung parts of the country. They’re the heroes of my profession.”
It’s certainly true that Heywood Hill boasts a fair few advantages over many bookshops. The building is beautiful, a Georgian town house in Curzon Street, next door to the celebrated “traditional gentlemen’s barber” Geo F Trumper.
The shop was founded by George Heywood Hill in 1936 (during another economic slump), and Nancy Mitford stepped in to help run it when he joined the Army; during the war she transformed it into (in Evelyn Waugh’s words) “a centre for all that was left of fashionable and intellectual London”.
In 1991 the shop was bought by Mitford’s brother-in-law, the Duke of Devonshire, and is now owned by his son, the current Duke – Dunne’s father-in-law. Dunne refers to it as “the Queen’s favourite bookshop” and we certainly know she is a regular customer as, in 2011, she granted it a Royal Warrant (something only done when a shop serves members of the Royal family). Dunne, quite properly, refuses to answer my questions about Her Majesty’s reading tastes.
But aristocratic connections aren’t enough in themselves to keep a bookshop solvent, and when Dunne joined Heywood Hill in 2011 after a career in political communications, the future was not rosy for indie bookshops: behemoths such as Waterstones and Amazon were dominating the market and e-books and audiobooks were gaining in popularity.
“We were on the verge of calling it a day, because there didn’t seem to be enough trade to justify the high cost of operating in Mayfair. But we looked around and thought, we’ll try anything to sell more books. We sold at festivals, and at launch parties and fairs and pop-up shops, anywhere where books could be sold, we offered our services.”
But the real eureka moment came when an American customer dropped into the shop one day. Patricia Lovejoy asked to see the manager, and thanked Dunne for the shop’s dedication to her: its staff had been choosing books and sending them to her in Connecticut for more than 30 years.
“So then I thought: what people enjoy about coming to the shop is the personal recommendation, forming a relationship with your bookseller. This social aspect has been important since Mitford’s time. But it looks like that social aspect can work remotely too.”
Thus, in 2013, was born Heywood Hill’s “A Year in Books” subscription offer. Camille Van de Velde, the shop’s head of subscriptions, explains how it works: the purchaser (or recipient, if it’s a gift) is invited to take part in a “reading consultation” with a staff member. “It’s about reading the recipient, finding out what genres they like and trying to gauge whether they want to take this opportunity to try things they wouldn’t normally read.”
Dunne says the shop resembles a Booker Prize jury meeting every day as the subscription staff debate what books will suit each customer’s particular needs. “They read on average about 100 books each a year so there are thousands of books that they can, as a group, recall. I’d put them up against any group of booksellers in the world.”
The subscription service is not cheap – £390 for a year’s hardback-amonth subscription, £225 for the equivalent number of paperbacks – but it’s proved popular, with customers in more than 50 countries and every American state.
But now, unexpectedly, the subscription service has proved to be a lifeline during the pandemic. “Overall our sales are down around 60 per cent but our subscription service is up this year over 80 per cent,” says Dunne. “Last year the subscriptions accounted for 15 per cent of our income and this year it’s going to be more like 65 per cent. We can’t be complacent but we’ve been very fortunate.” The service clearly means a lot to subscribers at a time when loneliness and boredom are rife, with one customer describing the monthly parcels as “a ray of light in the gloom”.
It helps that the Heywood Hill team are good at devising wheezes to promote their service. In 2017 they ran a competition with the prize of a free book a month for life. This year, the shop has run a similar prize draw, only this time people are being asked not to enter on their own behalf but to nominate somebody who deserves a lifetime’s supply of books. Nominees have included friends who have provided childcare for working parents and teachers who have made heroic efforts to keep pupils’ education on track during lockdown.
The subscription service is not a model that every bookshop could follow – “we’re a small physical shop so we could only grow by widening our catchment, and luckily we’re able to look internationally because Mayfair is a crossroads, an international meeting place”, says Dunne. But it does prove that experimentation and widening a shop’s remit could be the saviour of indie bookshops even in tough times.
“It’s about selling a service and not just a product, centring your business around the customer,” says Van de Velde. “And we’ve created something that people want to spend money on. So I feel quite confident about the future.”