Friday is getting closer and we’re looking forward to throwing open the doors at 9.30am to welcome customers to the new, improved, extended, fandabbydozy Edinburgh Bookshop.  If you’re around do drop by so that we’re not throwing open the doors and finding no-one there.  That would be quite depressing.

The top photo shows how the shop looked on Saturday just before Cat, Andrew and Malcolm got busy with the painbrushes and the bottom one shows how it looked this morning just before the carpet fitters arrived.  All coming on rather well as I’m sure you’ll agree.

Poor old Malcolm is fixing bookshelves in place this evening all by himself – although he’s taken the dog so he has some company – and tomorrow the electrician will be putting the last few lights up and we have to run computer cables etc to where we need them.  On Thursday we move the books, the computers, the till, the counter and all the enormous amounts of sundry stuff and I think it will be a late night getting the place looking absolutely perfect for the re-opening (9.30am on Friday – did I mention that?).  But it’s all coming on rather well don’t you think?

Here was the shop at the weekend before Malcolm, Andrew and Cat started painting and again this morning, painted and ready for the carpet-fitters.

This was how the shop looked on Saturday morning.  Removing the stairs and the mezzanine has increased the potential shelf space by about 80-90% and last minute adjustments to the new wall that has been built at the back and changing the door to a sliding one means that we can actually squeeze another drop in which means that we will have almost exactly the same amount of shelf-space that we has across the two shops before the merger so that’s very reassuring.

Our builders have worked at the most amazing speed and the plasterer was due in today to get the new plasterboard that you can see in the picture plastered (as plasterers do).  Tomorrow the electrician’s back to fit plug sockets and the joiners will do the fiddly bits of finishing before starting on moving the hatch into the basement – you can see it in the picture beneath Andrew’s feet.  Bookshelves are planned to go on top of it so we have to make a new one about 5 feet away.

By the middle of the week we can start decorating then all being well the carpet-fitters will be in next Monday and then we can start getting the bookshelves in place and all the books will move on Thursday 2nd September before we re-open on the 3rd.  That’s going to be a late one I think so we’ll be calling on friends with a good command of the alphabet to come and join us or at least bring fish suppers and beer!

But it’s all coming on apace – exciting times.

Well, the builders arrived bang on time and lost no time in cracking on with removing the mezzanine floor in the shop together with the wall that was behind the till, the kitchen units in the back and masses of other stuff we don’t need any more. So far I think we’re on schedule but I’ll be more certain when I’ve talked to head-joiner and the electrician tomorrow morning.  As you can see though, they made a good start in the first day.

Seeing the shop empty on Saturday was really hard and I actually got a bit teary – we’ve worked so hard over the last three years to turn it into a great children’s bookshop and to see it empty and forlorn was – completely irrationally – depressing.  However, by the end of the first day was ok; like seeing new beginnings and possibilities stretching ahead of us.

It’s going to be good.

So, last week was astonishing in many ways. On Wednesday, we hosted legendary actor Simon Callow, who was both interesting and utterly charming. He spoke about his new book, My Life in Pieces, which is partly about his life in the theatre, and partly pieces he has written along his theatrical journey. He was also extremely funny, and I was going to recount a couple of the anecdotes here, but I fear I don’t have the delivery (or the vocabulary: in the first page of the book he uses the word logorrhea, which I had to look up…). Suffice to say, projectile vomit and stage collapse has rarely been so amusing.

Simon Callow and lovely local author Vivian French, who was interviewing him

The next evening we had an event with Robin Ince. I say “an event” because it started out, organisationally speaking, with him going to talk about his new book Robin Ince’s Bad Book Club, about the worst (or perhaps the best?) books ever written. (My favourite was The Secrets of Picking Up Sexy Girls, which features a Chapter One entitled: ‘What is a girl?’) However, the evening ended up…somewhat differently. Robin did talk about the book for a while, but then some of his friends – mostly other comedians – came on to read from a couple of the worst/best books he had written about. Specifically, a series about Giant Killer Crabs. He then had someone doing interpretative dance about crabs, then a tap dancer being the crab, then other instruments. I can’t really explain, so here are a few pictures (click on them to make them bigger):

You'll have to take word for it, but Jo on the left is tap dancing whilst Robin is reading

Comedian Stewart Lee reading. I think this bit was filthy.

Comedians on instruments on the right and interpretative dance on the left

I can genuinely say that I haven’t laughed so much in a long time.

So.  The big move.

This has been a bit flexible – first it was going to be in the middle of August then we decided that we were ordering stock which would then be being stored for three weeks more or less as soon as it arrived and so then we decided to move early next week and then for the same reason and because we’re a bit short-staffed we decided to move the core children’s stock to The Edinburgh Bookshop tomorrow instead.  That also leaves us just over a week before the builders move in to clear out the enormous amount of junk that seems to have accumulated – bits of dump bins, proof copies, boxes, acres of bubblewrap that we’ve kept because it might come in useful and it feels too wasteful to bin it, posters, free stuff to give away, out-of-date catalogues… and to find places to store things, somewhere to work when we’re not in the shop etc, etc.

Anyway, from sometime tomorrow and defnitely from 7th August – all core children’s stock will be at The Edinburgh Bookshop at 181 Bruntsfield Place.  We’ll have as many books as possible there and will be able to arrange speedy delivery of anything we don’t have on the shelves.

Then, following 4 weeks of hard work by ourselves and our happy band of builders, sparkies, carpet fitters etc, not to mention a few of our friends and customers who have offered to come and get the shop ready for re-opening, we will be reopening the super-duper, fan-dabby-dozy, new and improved and enlarged The Edinburgh Bookshop on Friday 3rd September.  Mind you, we’ve just realised that that’s the day after our re-launch party so you might need to speak gently to us before about lunchtime or until Rocket’s bacon rolls have kicked in…

There you go – dates for your diary.

I know that some of you might be waiting to hear more about the bookshop goings on, but I stumbled on this link this morning, and I had to share: it’s a blog all about out-of-date library books found on the shelves! This one just had me half gasping in horror, half sniggering really inappropriately in front of a customer…

Yesterday I explained some of the hassles and pressures of running an independent bookselling operation, especially when it’s split over two shops a hundred yards apart and how profits are dented by duplicating costs and tasks.  The response both here and directly and via Twitter was really interesting and reminded me firstly that people are really interested in and supportive of indie bookshops (for which thanks) and secondly that I really enjoy blogging and the discussion that it generates so I have decided to make more time for that as I’ve been a bit slack recently (as has also been pointed out to me).

Anyway, I promised to tell you what we’re planning to do.

A month or two ago I was sitting in the office, which is on a mezzanine at the back of The Children’s Bookshop (storage and kitchen space below as not enough headroom to use it for retail space), doing the accounts and noticing (for the umpteenth time) just how many costs were duplicated by having two shop – instead of two phone lines I have four, two lots of business rates, two lots of broadband, two lots of water and electricity standing charges…. you get the picture.  And then there’s the admin time that’s duplicated – dealing with returns, checking invoices, staffing… just, you know, STUFF!

“What we need” I muttered to myself “is a bigger unit where we can combine both shops.”

And then it struck me (yeah, yeah, you saw this ages ago – I can be a bit slow on the uptake at times), that I was actually sitting in a bigger unit.  Or at least I was, assuming we did some building work such as taking the mezzanine out and moving the hatch into the basement.  So we all did measuring and pacing out and then Malcolm did more precise calculations and we counted how many bookcases we have now and how many we could fit in and found that the difference was small and so we fiddled around with the layout and discovered that, with some building work, we can fit the stock of both shops into what is now The Children’s Bookshop.

Opening The Edinburgh Bookshop in its own space was a good idea as it meant that it could establish its own identity, and we could find out whether the south side of Edinburgh (although increasingly it seems that our customers come from a much wider area) could and would support an independent bookshop.  And both shops are doing fine individually but rationalising is a good move and protects us to as great a degree as possible from further problems in the wider economy as well as giving me that precious day off each week – I’m already really looking forward to that!

So, from the beginning of September, Bruntsfield will just have the one bookshop but it will be bigger and brighter and have just as good a range of stock as the two shops do now.  The staff will be the same and as always we’ll be trying to provide the highest standards of customer service, we’ll be hunting out the most interesting books and we’ll still be running really interesting events – it will just all be in one place.

This weekend we start the endless process of emptying one shop, moving stock, trips to the tip, trips to our storage facility, setting up a temporary office at home, organising builders, electricians, carpet fitters and decorators, returning old stock, ordering new titles for the reopening, merging the websites… and of course, with our usual amazing planing, all of this is happening at the same time as Malcolm and I are planning to put our own house up for sale!  It’s a good job that the book festival starts in a week or so – we’ll be able to flop in Charlotte Square with someting fortifying after a long day of organising and hefting boxes.

Tomorrow, I’ll be back with details of timescales etc….

There has been lots of interest today following my outline of how things are for our bookshops and what we’re planning to do over the next month or two, including a phone call from a newspaper journalist who interpreted my grumping about increased business rates as explaining that that’s leading to us closing our shops.  Goodness, things aren’t that bad – far from it, but few businesses in Edinburgh at the moment would say that the rates revaluations have been a good thing, especially at a time when most people are seeing trade a bit thinner than a couple of years ago.  I have no doubt that the increased business rates, especially combined with the recent reports of banks’ sluggishness in providing credit and, in the case of our bank, their general ineptitude, will cause some businesses to go under.

So, if I had a message it would be ’shop local’.  In most cases, your local butcher, baker, fishmonger are just as good value as Tescobury’s.  Okay, so the butcher up the street might not be able to sell you a chicken for £3, but is that poor little ill-treated, unhealthy, water-injected bird really what you want to be eating?

And your local bookshop offers you so much more than Amazon or big chains even if we can’t compete with the cheap-chicken merchants – we can find you the novel that can change your life or the perfect present…  I’ve written about that more here – a blog post which I’m told caused some people to get a bit teary, which was a bit of a surprise.  Okay, I’m not going to be able to flog you Dan Brown or Katie Price’s latest output as cheap as Tesco or Amazon but that’s partly because we don’t bother stocking them – we don’t have room for all the books we love so why bother stocking tripe?

But if you want your high street to have a future that includes businesses other than huge conglomerates, that keeps jobs and investment and profits in your community then that’s in your own hands.  Because voting in the election for the party you think might keep the country afloat is only part of it.  We have another (sadly neglected at the moment) blog where we write about the trade side of bookselling and you can read about the latest shop local campaign being imported from the USA by the Booksellers Association here.

Anyway, this is an interim post – a mere digression – tomorrow I’ll be back with details of our changes and developments.

This time last year we just had the one bookshop, The Children’s Bookshop, and it was doing very nicely – we had a good reputation locally, were building really good links with schools and nurseries and had even been shortlisted for a couple of national trade awards.  But people kept telling us that what the area needed was a shop for grown-up books (not an ‘adult bookshop’ note; that’s a completely different market!), so we added a drop of grown-up novels to the children’s shop and it did tremendously well so when Malcolm and I passed an empty unit just a hundred yards up the road on our way to lunch it was no surprise to anyone that we came back to the office saying ‘we’ve had a thought…’.

So, in September 2009, The Edinburgh Bookshop opened just up the road from The Children’s Bookshop and after a slow-but-steady start – well, we did have a builders’ portakabin parked outside it for the first two months and a particularly unsightly team of builders therein – we had a cracking Christmas and we’ve had a steady and growing 2010.  We have three thriving book groups, we were shortlisted for Independent Bookshop of the Year and are building a good reputation with publishers as people who can put a good event together.

However, we’ve had a stressful few months with admin issues at Companies House, Edinburgh City Council jacking up our business rates so that we now spend £8.5k (well someone’s got to pay for the trams) on rates for the two shops (and we pay extra for water and rubbish collection – it isn’t like the council tax), and being a tenant is much more stressful than owning the property (roof falls in?  Our problem.  Basement floods?  Our problem too.  Buildings insurance?  Yep, that’s down to us).  And however much the new government tells us that they want to support small businesses (and my new Lib Dem MP certainly seems like a decent chap), the cuts in public spending etc mean that we suspect that this recession might get worse again before it gets better.

So, what to do to enable us to continue to build a thriving business whilst at the same time protecting us from potential downsides?  And organising ourselves so that Malcolm and I might even get the odd day off (although what do people do with days off?  Will I need to take up a hobby or something?  Or do housework?  Perish the thought!) or have time to work on some of the other projects we have on the go.  Well, it seems the answer was staring us in the face all along…

Pop back tomorrow and all will be revealed about the forthcoming changes at The Children’s Bookshop and The Edinburgh Bookshop…

Have a look at this article  about The Edinburgh Bookshop in the FT’s How to Spend It  magazine!

It sounds cheesy, but we really do want to make The Edinburgh Bookshop the book lover’s bookshop. If you’ve not visited us yet, we have a Simon Callow event in August, so that’s a perfect excuse to come to Edinburgh!