Shopping around

What’s good news for Waterstones should be good news for readers too. The bookseller reported an 80 per cent rise in profits for the last financial year and opened shops in St Neots, Deal, Weybridge, Epsom and Blackheath at the end of 2017; and there are plans to open another ten or so this year. Confusingly, though, the shops in Deal, Weybridge and Blackheath are heavily disguised – named after the towns/area, rather than being called Waterstones, something that has already been tried in Southwold, Rye and Harpenden. Critics complain that these unbranded shops look like independent bookshops, but so what? Unless they are responsible for closing down independents, does it matter? Surely a bookshop in your local town is better than no bookshop at all. And James Daunt, Waterstones managing director, believes that by making each shop autonomous (with central buying and price fixing abandoned), they are behaving like independents anyway.

The news from WH Smith is not so good. Its book business saw a drop in revenue of 4 per cent. So it’s all change at its larger stores. Carl Cowling, managing director of WH Smith High Street, told the Bookseller that it’s going to slim down its range of books and bring prominence to ‘two or three titles per shelf’. (Good news for the likes of Lee Child, whose Night School, by the way, was the UK Libraries’ most borrowed book in 2017.) Smith’s sees its core customers as ‘light readers’, and wants to be ‘famous for being the home of reassurance and recommendation’.

Reassurance and recommendation: where better to turn than these pages. Inside is a huge selection of book reviews – definitely, though, for ‘heavy’ as well as ‘light’ readers – ranging from Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury, the fastest-selling non-fiction book of all time, to Mark Forsyth’s Short History of Drunkenness, via novels by John Banville, Julian Barnes and Paul Theroux…