Book lovers - welcome to your spiritual home

Welcome to Mr B's!
Our beautiful children's room The Wood Between the Words
The Imaginarium - a space for visiting creatives
The Shop Front on John Street
In our Chris Riddell doodled loo
Our author pen ceiling

Within these walls, books reign supreme

Mr B's is a beautiful, energetic and innovative bookshop on John Street in the heart of Bath. It's a bright labyrinthine space where book-related chatter and advice seems ever-present and you never know what you might encounter next, from claw-foot bath book displays to toilets illustrated by Chris Riddell. We opened our shop in 2006 and it has twice been named the UK's best independent bookshop. In 2015 the Guardian named Mr B's one of the ten best bookshops in the world. Scroll onwards for more of our story or, better still, come and see us!

Meet the Mr B's team

Opinionated bookselling

Stepping into Mr B's, the chances are someone will ask if you'd like a recommendation. After years of hand-selling books, conducting Reading Spas and making personalised picks for our Reading Subscribers we're confident that we can find a book to suit your tastes. We boost our book knowledge by spending our time talking to customers, getting tips and feedback - Mr B's is a place where bookish chat is always on offer. Of course, if you prefer a quiet look around, that's fine too - we understand the thrill of the tranquil browse. If you can't make it to the shop then test us on our Recommendation Station!

Extreme customer service

We believe in offering the highest possible level of customer service. That's partly about being able to order most in-print titles the next day or being like a dog-with-a-bone when tracking down for you that childhood book that you remember was blue and had a windmill on the cover. It's more than that though. It's running a shop that feels likes it's yours as well as ours. It's about instinctively knowing what books our regular customers will enjoy. It's about offering a memorable (if sometimes eccentric) experience to all visitors and about sharing and spreading our joyous book obsession with each of you.

The story of Mr B's

Just in case you ever find yourself wondering how Mr B’s came about, how bad we were at bookselling when we started or what weird stuff has happened between our walls over the years, we’ve written an unashamedly navel-gazing timeline for you to play with - and to help us remember it all.

Thu 02 Sep 2004

An idea hatched

On day 4 of their honeymoon, Nic and Juliette sat on a balcony in Friday Harbor on San Juan Island, gin and tonics in hand, and contemplated their visit the previous day to the inspirational independent bookshop The Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle. At some point that night one of them said "Maybe we should stop being lawyers and set up a bookshop". After a year spent convincing themselves this was a good idea, dreaming up absurdly long prospective names for the shop, resigning from jobs and moving from their Prague home to Holt (a few miles from Bath), Nic headed North for a month to see bookshops and quiz booksellers, including the incredibly helpful folk at Bramhall's "Simply Books".

Discover what happened in between...

Thu 22 Jun 2006

Hiding the pink carpet

With a lease signed on a former antiques showroom in John St, floors were stripped, shabby chic(ish) furniture was hunted down, a claw-foot bath was "borrowed" and a bizarre pink wall carpet was hidden behind bookshelves. Juliette's brother Harvey joined the fun as everyone spent night after night hand-picking 8000 books in an eye-watering spreadsheet marathon. At noon the door was opened for the first time and customers appeared. Cue panic from Juliette - in the whirr of preparation she'd forgotten to figure out how to actually use the till!

Mon 12 May 2008

Independent bookshop of the year!

On a hot summer's night in Brighton the Mr B's team donned black ties and headed into a twinkly windowless ballroom. Six hours, quite a lot of bubbly, some overcooked chicken, a lot of nervousness and some disbelief later we emerged clutching our first "Nibbie" - the industry gong naming us Independent Bookshop of the Year for the UK & Ireland.

Mon 07 Jul 2008

Books were harmed in the making of this wall

After just eighteen months of trading, the chance to expand to a third floor presented itself. In July Mr B’s unveiled two new rooms - one crammed with more visual books and another the “bibliotherapy room”, a salon like space with comfy armchairs, face-out list displays, coffee pot, fireplace, a reading booth for trying on books. En route visitors would pass the Tin Tin staircase, two full comic books painstakingly wallpapered on page by page and in perfect order to form a completely readable wall.

Tue 01 Jul 2008

Bigger space, bigger team

With a new floor came new team-members including Ed, the world’s most persuasive, impassioned and opinionated bookseller. Plucked from a retail career that had seen him sell everything from bacon sandwiches (but oh, that chilli jam – RIP Blackstone's Deli of Queen Street) to upscale pants, Ed could finally spend his days talking about his one true love, books (and later pencils) – and he hasn’t stopped talking about them since.

Tue 21 Sep 2010

Ladies and gentlemen, "The Bookshop Band"

Feeling the standard author talk format could use a refresh, the team decided to add food and music to each event and for the music part chatted to customer and local musician Ben Please. Once Ben had persuaded Poppy Pitt and Beth Porter to join in, The Bookshop Band was formed to write and perform songs inspired by the books of guest authors making its debut in front of Francis Spufford. Hundreds of songs, bookshop tours, music and literary festival sets, publisher commissions, a collaborative album with Pete Townsend, a marriage and two babies later, the band plays on.

Mon 16 May 2011

Another night out

In London town to our bewilderment we picked up our second "Independent Bookshop of the Year" award thanks to our innovations in bookselling. It seems that pub conversation that had led to us creating our Mr B's Reading Spa and then the Mr B's Reading Subscription, had really paid off!

Mon 17 Sep 2012

The howling miller

Tasked with giving a talk about the benefits of bookshop/publisher collaborations at the annual Booksellers Association conference, Nic and Canongate Book’s head honcho Jamie Byng realised in July that their collaborations were limited to chatting to one another about books. And so the first Mr B’s “special edition” was born, a hardback version of Arto Paasilinna’s “The Howling Miller” with a Mr B’s exclusive cover designed by local artist SJ Griffey, prepared for print by Canongate and sold at Mr B’s. A first toe dipped in the world of publishing.

Thu 06 Nov 2014

Let's make a publishing house

Spurred on by two collaborations with publishers, Mr B’s decides to make its own publishing house. Fox, Finch & Tepper was born and began acquiring rights to wonderful but neglected novels and persuading bookshops all over the UK to give them some table space. First off the presses were Tim Gautreaux’s “The Next Step in the Dance” and D’Arcy Niland’s Australian modern classic “The Shiralee”, both oozing with sense of place and the former sporting a letterpress cover courtesy of Athena at Bath’s Meticulous Ink.

Mon 19 Jun 2017

Rock'n'roll bookselling

At 8am on an already roasting hot June day Tom, Lucinda, Ed, Nic arrived on the Glastonbury festival site and began building the Mr B's festival bookshop. Joined by 6000 books and Rachel from wholesaler and project partner Bertram Books the crew constructed, sweated, shelved, recommended, sold (day and night), chatted, rocked, rolled, partied (occasionally), slept (rarely) and, finally and blissfully dismantled, exited and showered.

Mon 11 Feb 2019

Bigger, bolder, better

With the incredible support of our customers and followers across the globe for our crowdfunding campaign, we were able to massively expand the shop into the next door space, to create a stunning new space and beautiful, zingy new children's room The Wood Between the Words, elaborately decorated with murals by extraordinary Bristol-based artist Alex Lucas www.lucasantics.com.

Fri 06 Mar 2020

Little did we all know...

Just days before the whole world changed with the announcement of the first lock-down, we were merrily and innocently enjoying another fun World Book Day with Gemma dressed up as Nimona, fighting fictional characters rather than deadly pandemic viruses.

Sat 20 Mar 2021

PIVOT!!!

Along with the rest of the world, Covid turned everything on its head. Overnight we became depressingly familiar with words like furlough, lockdown and "social-distancing measures" as we scrambled to keep up with constant changes to rules, all the while trying to help get books to customers safely, keep our staff employed and educate our kids from home. So we learned, along with everyone else to "pivot". And pivot we did. We came up with as many fun and ingenious ways as we could to reach out to self-isolating, time-rich and book-hungry customers, to keep their brains and souls entertained.

And so were born "Surprise reads!", "Box-o'teeth" author interviews on zoom, Lockdown podcasts and Mr B's Youtube Channel with Gemma's storytimes among other innovations.

Wed 10 Nov 2021

Back in the Saddle

With the easing of lockdowns came the time to breathe some time and love once more into our publishing house Fox, Finch & Tepper and in November 2021 we published the brilliant Iberia - cycling and life musings from Iberia during the pandemic by the brilliant travel writer Julian Sayerer and featuring the stunning cover illustration by one of our very own talented team members Tessimo Mahuta.

Thu 03 Mar 2022

As you were....

And just like that, two years after Gemma's storytime for World Book Day March 2020 and before everything went completely crazy, we were back in costume to celebrate the world of books and kids once more - as if nothing had ever happened!

Thu 28 Jul 2022

WO-MAD for it

No summer feels truly complete at Mr B's without a pop-up festival shop at WOMAD. Wellies, dungarees and kombucha a-plenty, the post-pandemic vibes here were amazing and we've carried on coming every year since!

Wed 15 Jun 2022

Mr B and Mrs B get their own desks!

16 years on and Nic and Juliette finally get their own desks! Along with plenty more for the team as we expanded into offices right opposite our shop - a wonderful pay-off for enduring a whole lot of building noise as the fancy new townhouse was constructed in place of a flat-roofed leaky-drained storehouse. Officially the offices of Fox, Finch & Tepper and the Mr B's Subscriptions team, this fabulous new space houses desks for Mr and Mrs B, plenty of storage and a swish new space for meetings. Who said Independent bookshops couldn't be all laa-dee-daa once in a while?

Tue 28 Feb 2023

Coming full circle

Nearly 20 years on from the visit to Seattle that inspired Juliette and Nic to embark on setting up Mr B's and they came around full circle in February 2023 to revisit the Elliott Bay Book Company where the dream all began - it was part of their trip to the American Booksellers Association Winter Institute held in Seattle and where Nic was talking on a panel in his role as Executive Chair of the Booksellers Association of UK and Ireland. Although it had changed location in the city, Elliott Bay was just as characterful as when they first saw it when it sparked off their retail journey!

Thu 12 Oct 2023

Will you join our club?

Following the huge success of our bespoke Reading Subscriptions Tom H and the subs team came up with the idea of reading clubs - monthly subscriptions of our very favourite brand new books in particular genres. They took aim with the Crime Syndicate and that hit the mark, so they launched two more clubs in 2023, both for kids - Picturebook Pioneers for little ones and Torchlit Tales Society for middle grade kids. Watch this space (well, tbh sign up to our newsletter) for news of more to come!....

Fri 01 Dec 2023

A lock-in you say? now that's more like it!

While we hope to never see a lockdown again, we will happily do more lock-ins! To celebrate the launch of our annual Christmas Catalogue (handpicked titles across genres with cover designs over the years by amazing illustrators such as Jackie Morris, Alex T Smith, Sarah Mcintyre and Nadia Shireen among many more), we hosted our first Mr B's Festive Lock-in at the end of 2023, with mince pies, bubbly and lots of us on hand to give recommendations and help choose the perfect bookish gifts.

Sat 01 Jun 2024

Merch ado about nothing

Once again inspired by our bookseller friends across the pond, we thought it high time to have some fun designing some new Mr B's merch so you lovely customers can think of us whenever you drink from your Mr B's-illustrated-shop-front-coffee-mug and open your Mr B's-sticker-adorned laptops. A new array of merch lines our shelves with plenty more in the pipeline so watch this space (again, not really here - our newsletter is the best place to go for all the latest Mr B's antics!)