Readings, quizzes and a very small bar are filling shops on weeknights.
On a wet Wednesday in the old town, the queue outside Gallow and Daughters starts forming at a quarter to seven. By the time the doors open, forty people are waiting with umbrellas to get into a shop that sells second-hand novels, poetry pamphlets and, since last spring, half pints of a local pale ale from a counter not much bigger than an ironing board.
Inside, chairs have been squeezed between the history shelves and the children’s corner. Tonight is the monthly literary quiz, and the teams have names such as Bleak House Rules and The Unreliable Narrators. The prize is a twenty-pound book token and the right to choose next month’s theme. Last month it was shipwrecks.
A licence and a hunch
Gallow and Daughters is one of at least seven bookshops in Calder and the surrounding towns that have begun running regular weeknight events, and one of four that have taken out a small premises licence to sell drink. Owners say the evenings began as a way to bring in trade on slow days. They have become something closer to a social life for people who no longer go to the pub, or who never did.
“We noticed that people came for a reading, stayed for an hour, and then said they had nowhere else to go that wasn’t loud or expensive. So we gave them somewhere,” said Imogen Gallow, who runs the shop with her father, Peter.
Ms Gallow said evening events now bring in about a quarter of the shop’s weekly takings, partly from tickets and drinks but mostly from books bought on the way out. Attendance at the quiz has doubled since the spring.
Who comes, and why
The audiences are mixed. At the quiz there are students from the university, a group of retired teachers, two nurses just off shift and a man who says he has not missed a session since the first one. Several people mention that they stopped drinking or cut back, and found that a pub without much to do was not a place they wanted to spend an evening.
Across the river, The Reading Room in Harrow runs a silent reading night on Mondays, where people bring their own book, buy a drink and read in company for two hours without talking. It sells out most weeks. In Port Selwyn, the harbourside shop Tidewrack holds open-mic poetry on Thursdays and a children’s story hour on Saturday mornings, and has added a shelf of non-alcoholic beers and ciders after customers asked for them.
Rhys Delacourt, who manages The Reading Room, said the shop had expected the silent nights to attract a handful of regulars. “We had sixty people on the second week,” he said. “It turns out a lot of people want to be around others without having to perform. A bookshop is very good at that.”
Some caution from the trade
Not every bookseller is convinced. Some worry that events take time and staff away from the daily work of running a shop, and that alcohol licensing adds paperwork and risk. The regional booksellers’ association advises members to start with free events and add drink only once there is demand, and notes that most shops selling alcohol keep it to one or two drinks a head.
Publicans, too, have mixed feelings. One landlord in the old town said he welcomed anything that brought people out on a weeknight, but pointed out that pubs pay higher rates and face stricter rules. A few have responded by hosting book clubs of their own.
Back at Gallow and Daughters, the quiz ends at nine with a tie-break on the first line of a famous novel. The winners leave with their token; most of the losers leave with a paperback. By half past nine the chairs are folded, the counter wiped down, and the shop is dark again until the morning.
