Here is part 2 of the story of the start of Mr B’s. Get your brew and settle down to read all about how we tackled the renovations, our struggles with the till manual and where we got the bath from. I was hoping to cram everything into two parts but as memories started coming back to me, it became clear a part 3 was going to be needed which will follow soon where I take you from “soft” to “official” launch.
The shop design – and a bath takes centre stage
We gave ourselves three months from signing the lease to transform the shop and set it all up before opening. As tasks go, this was a beast given we had not one clue what we were doing. Nic and Harvey were mostly in charge of negotiating with publishers, tech and stock and I was self-appointed head of renovations and designer of the shop space.
The shop was in what estate agents might describe as “a tired state”. Dusty old pink carpets (even some carpeted walls!), damp areas and the whole thing needed a complete cosmetic overhaul. In between scraping off peeling wallpaper and co-ordinating the various trades working on site, there was also the question of planning the layout of the shelves and the counter and then liaising with shelving suppliers. This was mostly a question of common sense – if there’s a wall, put some shelves on it – but various other factors played a part. How many books would we need to be selling to make a profit and was a back-office space essential or a luxury? Where was the counter best placed? Every decision felt crucial and there was no financial wiggle room for mistakes.
A brief whirlwind of activity later and we had the barebones of our baby shop in place, smelling of fresh paint, sanded floors and new carpet. Now the proper fun could begin, where I could at last be free to pour all my bottled up ideas into creating a shop bursting with personality, charm and warmth, a shop that could live up to its fancy name.
I’m not going to lie, this part of the project was possibly the most fun I have ever had in my life. By nature I am whatever you call the antithesis of a minimalist. I get a huge thrill from walking into a space which is completely adorned with colourful, fabulous stuff – a place where you feel that around every corner or nook you’ll discover something cool or bizarre, that has a story behind it. This was what I wanted to bring to Mr B’s, but whilst still allowing it to feel fresh and neat.
Luckily, the kind of random, offbeat stuff I was after could usually be found relatively cheaply, if you were prepared to hunt for it. This kind of searching was truly joyful in the days before soul-destroying internet trawling. I drove my ugly burgundy Nissan all over the South West scouring second-hand and charity shops, fairs and reclamation yards for all manner of characterful curios to breathe heart into our shop and make it feel like a wondrous book-filled emporium that you’d never want to leave.
Rummaging and upcycling, our shoestring budget also meant getting creative, such as wallpapering of the loo with old book covers. We also scavenged as much as we could from Nic’s parents, who by happy fortune had recently moved nearby and were also renovating their new house. Among other things, they had a roll-top bath they were looking to offload. In need of some kind of centrepiece, I figured I could somehow make it work as a book display, “a bath in Bath” and all that. I love that it would become one of the most iconic features of the shop and that twenty years on it would still sit in pride of place on its own little plinth.
The books and a lot of spreadsheets
Amidst the frenzy of activity at the shop, back at our attic HQ Nic and Harvey were busy negotiating with publishers, buying IT and setting up phone contracts. We were now just missing the books.
By far the most common way to stock a brand new bookshop is to ask the wholesaler for a bulk opening stock, chosen on the basis of various sales stats. This however just didn’t sit with our vision of a shop that was all about recommendations and hand-selling. We felt it was vital that we should hand-pick each and every title ourselves. A fun task when you are choosing a couple of hundred books but a novelty that definitely wore off by the 3000th book, especially when we realised we weren’t even half-way yet!
We are often asked how we chose which books to stock and the answer was that we genuinely trawled through Norton’s Anthology of English Literature, starting from “A”! We asked all of our friends to tell us their favourite ever 20 or so books, we plied through endless online resources and of course our own bookshelves and cut and paste ISBN numbers onto spreadsheets into the wee hours of many, many mornings until we finally had an opening stock list that we were happy with and sent off the orders. We even bought some CDs to sell from our “Music to Read By” section and some DVDs of “Films from Books”.
With only days until launch, it was the till that proved to be the biggest head-scratcher of all. Not quite in the “Open All Hours” style, but it was a behemoth of a machine nonetheless. No integrated POS here, just good old fashioned clunky buttons and a whopping indecipherable instruction manual.
Good Timing and The First Ever Book Sale
It was a piping hot day in June 2006 when all the books were due to arrive from our wholesaler. They were scheduled to arrive early afternoon so Nic stayed at the shop, puzzling over the till while Harvey and I went to run various errands.
We strolled back late morning to find the shop filled with hundreds of boxes and Nic, dripping with sweat, red-faced and clutching his inhaler. It transpired that the delivery truck had arrived early and deposited the entire opening stock of boxes on pallets in the road outside the shop. With beeping traffic and unable to get hold of us in the days before decent phone reception, Nic had no option but to single-handedly shift all hundred or so boxes into the shop on his own in the sweltering heat. A true initiation into life as an independent bookseller.
We revelled in unpacking the crisp, gorgeous new books and carefully arranging them to fill the ready-waiting bare shelves. At least for the first couple of hours. As with most of the jobs, by midnight the excitement and shine had worn off. More of the same the next day, with a little more till puzzling. And the next. Parents arrived intermittently with refreshments and found themselves directed to the history section with an armful of shelving. The music blared and the cold fans blew as we raced around with only a day to go before the “soft launch” on 22nd June 2006.
My dad had come up with some little limericks that we had posted in our windows in anticipation of our launch and curious passers-by and locals had been peering in the windows while we toiled. It was during a donut-fuelled break that a man creaked open the door left ajar for some airflow and asked if he could buy a book. We explained that we weren’t open yet but asked what book he was after. “The Dangerous Book for Boys” he said. Blimey, we had that one in stock (a popular book that summer)! Then why not sell it right now? And just like that we made our first sale for £20 cash before we’d yet even figured out how to work the till.
Part 3 coming soon – panic kicks in, we are considered “very brave” and the official ribbon is cut!