Later the same day, a woman was browsing the fantasy section when her partner said: ‘Why couldn’t you have a normal addiction like alcohol?’ which turned quite a few heads. She responded, a little muted, ‘I’d get rid of you before I got rid of space for more books.’ Hopefully the rest of their day was great!

A highlight was when one of our most loyal and polite customers (in his elder years) popped in to ask whether the ‘catalogue of remaindered titles’ he buys books from at a massively reduced price, lists books I can also get hold of. Other bookshop browsers were amused by this as I explained it wasn’t something I offered, mainly because we sell new titles. He was charming throughout the full-volume exchange and I know he will continue to order new releases with us.

Festival window display by bookshop customer, Hannah, of Easter egg fame.

We are poised at the starting line of Hay Festival and our town is beginning to fill up. We have had a week of unfamiliar delivery drivers trying to find various addresses - some going the wrong way up the one-way street outside the shop. In real time this means I’m looking out on full pavements instead of one person passing every ten minutes, so it’s quite the gear-shift and demands a change of mental pace, as well as physical. For ten days I feel like I’m running a city bookshop. Sophie, my colleague and TikTok star (@charmed by fantasy) loves the upsurge in energy and takes command of the shopfloor with the flourish of one of her FMCs (female main characters to you and me). The festival is fabulous of course, and even though it’s centred in a self-contained hub half-a-mile up the road, instead of smack in the town centre as it used to be, you can’t overstate the fathomless whoop it gives our small market town. People compare it to Glastonbury and St Ives during their peak season. Some residents cash-in by renting out their homes and shipping out to calmer seas, others avoid town altogether, but I’ve lived in and around Hay for 20 years and embrace its gigantic force. Before bookselling I worked for the festival in various guises and in my role as a local arts editor I got to camp out and attend all ten days for the price of filing a decent amount of reviews – the paper’s editor described Hay Festival as the ‘cherry on the cake’ and she was right. I loved it. At North Books we hope to welcome a few authors who stray into town and hopefully we’ll have at least one of their books in stock! Hay Festival Global (as it’s now branded) has put Hay on the map but without Richard Booth would the festival have taken root? One talk I look forward to going along to is with the author of Richard Booth’s latest biography, James Hanning, in conversation with Hay Bookseller, Anne Addyman (of Addymans bookshop fame) who I’m a big fan of.

I was almost able to tell you what it was like being interviewed on Radio Four’s Today programme during their festival broadcasts this weekend – I was invited to discuss bookselling trends alongside a lauded BookTok presence, Jack Edwards. It was going to be a 7am start so I was not overly enthusiastic, but as casually as the invitation arrived in my email inbox, so followed the un-invitation 24 hours later when I was told that the show had ‘taken a change in direction’. My teenage daughter was more excited about me meeting the handsome BookTok-er than her mother finding her five minutes of fame, but perhaps Jack will stop by the bookshop regardless!

In non-festival news we have the winner of this year’s international Booker prize, Taiwan Travelogue by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ, an announcement that coincided with the fifth meeting of our Found in Translation book-group. Our read for May was On the Calculation of Volume 1 by Danish writer, Solvej Balle. It was a brilliant few who met in the bookshop to discuss this current hot read and everyone had reservations about it except for the person who had read all four volumes (there are three more in the pipeline!) and reassured us that this is just the start of something really rather wonderful which prompted us to ponder about the few times a book series improves as it goes on – I could only think of The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole.

Found in Translation bookgroup in the bookshop

The talk of the lower town (Broad Street) is that the chippie appears to be mid-reno and won’t be open during the festival, having been taken over earlier this year. For many, Hay chippie offers affordable take-aways during the bustling days ahead when food on-site is a bit pricey for a family outing, but there will be pop-ups aplenty to fill any carb-shaped holes. One of the pluses of becoming a temporary city is that we have foodie options to bolster the year-round offerings, and there is always adventure to be had. One Sunday browser did tell me that if I seriously wanted to make money during Hay Festival the thing to do was to sell chips… maybe next year! For now though, I am doing a nice sideline in these splendid, stackable stools from my mate Tom – prices start at £640, handmade in either oak or ash.

Hereford maker, Tom Straker and his splendid, stackable stool in locally-sourced ash.

There are days when some people’s rudeness astounds me and I am reminded how entirely rude individuals can be. I can’t call them customers because they rarely have any intention to buy a book. They see bookshops as an inanimate backdrop to their lives – not a place that is staffed by actual human beings who care about the books that colour their shelves and may actually believe they have feelings (and yes, I may be one of them!).

This particular afternoon, an unseasonally warm day for Hay in Spring, one couple began their visit with a full-on photoshoot in the doorway. A passing stranger agreed to take a snap of the two of them together – sweet, I think. They must be real booklovers…

Cardinal sin numero uno is that I spot the man openly eating a chocolate bar – he can’t stop stuffing it down even for five minutes and he saunters past the ‘no food’ sign without a backward glance, before wandering into the ‘library’ room where Crime takes priority. I then see a full photo-shoot taking shape among Books About Books, featuring the female half of the pairing peeping out from behind randomly chosen hardbacks while Chocolate Man multi-tasks as a proud photographer who continues to munch one-handed.

I have to interrupt their madness by pointing out the no eating embargo but unabashed they continue their digital haul, dancing around other areas of the shopfloor mainly in my direct eye-line, before floating away like butterflies without a whiff of a purchase.

You may wonder why this is so very offensive, but in an afternoon of zero book sales it was a pantomime I could live without watching. They never once acknowledged me in their fabulously self-indulgent routine, which will doubtless light up social media as a ‘wow, what a cute little book world’ homage. Time for a restorative cuppa.

To balance this assault on my sensibilities, the next three real customers were charming and this is what keeps me smiling. It’s one in four (or in this case two, although I’m counting him as an accessory) who spoils everything.

In other news I was gifted some chocolate samples and on the basis that a book and a dairy bar make a near-perfect gift combo I may eke out this research for a while. There’s plenty to go around our staff trio and we all have our favourite sweet treats.

Even on a quiet day there’s generally a ‘character’ or two who could light up a sit-com stage. This week a new face stepped in, enthralled by a book in the window (we like that). The book that caught this man’s attention was written by someone he professed to have ‘fallen in love with’ when they met years before, in another life. Coincidentally his much-adored author had held an event in the bookshop earlier this year and I confirm that she is still beautiful, inside and out. She brought me a medicinal tea from her kitchen after hearing that I was suffering from a chest infection and was voiceless. How kind was that?

Unfortunately, the well-heeled and extremely well-spoken gent who spoke like someone off the BBC in the 90s, had forgotten his wallet so back the book went into the window –perhaps he’ll return to complete the story. I mused about whether to let the author know she had a smouldering fan from 20 years ago in case she is now single (and what a great rom-com that would make) but thought better of it, not only in terms of GDPR but also because my days tend to be complicated enough.

When we last spoke I mentioned the predictable ‘lull’ before the festival hits later this month and last week was such a cavern that I thought the quiet had come early – just twelve sales on Friday before the May Day bank holiday which makes an average of about two an hour. Obviously, lots of chit-chat in-between and me trying to generate some income by returning books that have been on our shelves for twelve months (that’s a thing), which I achieved by close-of-play. Although it’s not income as such (because obviously I paid for the books when I got them in), but nevertheless it’s what us shopkeepers keenly call cashflow and I decided the time was right. It’s not straightforward – there are hoops to jump through and the books must be in pristine, saleable, condition (after 12 months!), but nevertheless there’s a sense of achievement when a box is filled and authorised and there’s new space for the current stock to ‘breathe’.

We are planning the festival window alongside an influx of stock to carry us through the bank holiday weekend and into the (fingers tightly crossed) busy ten days of Hay Festival. A bookshop friend who made the splendid Easter eggs for the Easter window is back for more challenge – all will be revealed next time but enjoy this photographic teaser. You have to admire a crafty customer.

Honestly, I suffer from imposter syndrome as much as the next person and embarking on a second career when your life is well into its mid-section does nothing for confidence when mingling with peers of 30 years-plus experience. Bookselling is nothing if not a magnet for fidelity and endurance. Worker bees become queens after serving their dues and who am I but a latecomer to the hive? Three hundred delegates of varying bookselling stripes settled in the gateway to Italy that is Verona for the RISE bookselling conference – an acronym which stands for Resilience, Innovation and Sustainability for the Enhancement of Bookselling but at a grassroots level, it’s all about support.

I’m not going to bore you with the ins and outs of the conference, which as an entity doesn’t seem to have changed hugely since the end of the last Millennium - keynote speaker/workshop/panel discussion all stitched together with sponsored food and drink sessions (on the whole rather nice) and supported by trade stands. It’s exhausting mingling with 300 other people but somehow a bit more like Russian roulette when you don’t know whether you’ll embark on a conversation in the coffee queue with someone from Tobago or the Netherlands. My language skills showed themselves to be worse than even I anticipated but luckily most booksellers speak good English. They’re also a pretty friendly bunch, although humour didn’t always translate. I had written a much longer and possibly more dramatic post about the conference but it was lost forever in a tunnel in the Alps, so you were saved my moans about my travelling companion’s lack of sharing of snacks on our seven hour train journey from Milan.

I travelled to the conference via Paris and Milan which anyone infatuated with long-distance train travel knows is a standard route into Europe. I’m a self-confessed train nerd and as well as being a groupie of the ‘man in seat 61’, I now have my preferred trains (the fast red one please) and routes (yes, I do want to arrive at Milan Centrale station as it is so fantastic). The journey did allow for a bit of meandering in Paris on both the outward and return leg and the weather was suitably Spring-ish. Basically, my Easter shopkeeper bones were reinvigorated by the change in tempo and level of sunshine.

It turns out I’m less good at the detail with accommodation as I confidently turned up at a hotel opposite Gard de Lyon very late in the evening to discover I had in fact booked a hotel of almost the identical name opposite the Gard du Nord, nearly 2.5km away. Luckily my travel companion and mini-bookseller (who is actually a full head taller than me) successfully booked us in to the correct hotel within 30 minutes and I then just had to reconcile myself to the third hotel in a row where a cup of tea on arrival was not available and swallow my failure. When did I become so British?

An irony of the adventure was that I finished my book on the first train, which left me hanging on till we reached Italy to replenish. With the six or so proofs standing next to my bed that I am halfway through reading, I am sick to say I have nothing to read on trains two and three, which leaves me feeling like I am running out of air. The flavour of the book I have finished is with me and I can savour that for a day but then I begin to get a bit edgy. Luckily day one of the conference begins with a cultural tour which takes in two bookshops. My companion encourages me to strike out into new territory and I am soon lost in a fantasy title that has been selling well in the shop for months. I now realise why people need a good fake world to escape to.

But a week that begins in Verona does not end there. I returned to the bookshop on Wednesday to fast-track myself into final event preparation for this month’s talk; Think Like a Forest by Ben Rawlence of Black Mountains College fame. It’s a genuinely sweet book; a compilation of letters to his daughters written across the span of their first twelve years, with a focus on the environment and changing climate. Ben is an activist as well as many other things but the College is quite close to the bookshop and I’ve been trying to forge links since I opened in 2022. It’s exciting to have him and his elder daughter here to talk about the book and how it came about and the 14 or so people who came all said how much they enjoyed it. I have to say that his daughter, Daphne, rather stole the show with her emotional intelligence off the charts for a 12-year-old. When asked by Mark Lynas (also a writer on climate issues) some tricky questions to do with grief and the climate she said:

Blimey. Gives you faith in the generation to come and how they might take on the challenges ahead. Let’s make it a viral hit!

Not an average week then.

Hay is strangely quiet after Easter as the normal lull before Hay Fever (festival) hits in a month’s time and I, for one, am intending to enjoy it.

But you can’t let words get you down. I just realise I’m much more sensitive than even I thought.

A highlight of the week was one of our resident book-groups meeting in the garden. Yes it was the warmest day of the year and no we’ve never attempted this before but layers to hand; al fresco we met. The book discussion was across the range of Toni Morrison’s collected works because Hay Reads looks at an author as opposed to a title. This wasn’t my idea just to be clear but that of two bookish friends who had recently moved to the area around the time North Books was opening. It puts a little more pressure on members as they have to be proactive in the choice of reading matter and this definitely puts some readers off. And you don’t get the deep dive into one specific text as you would in a regular book-group but then you get much more of a flavour of the writer’s work in development over their lifetime. Over the past three years we’ve read James Baldwin, Colm Toibin, Kae Tempest, Ursula K. Le Guin and Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche to name a few. It’s always a good craic as the leaders are both writers too so their insights are always valuable.

Easter holidays are thrumming along and keeping the shelves appealing with current bestsellers is a job of work. Often I’m ordering books and dealing with returns when people think I’m ‘off’ but with my fresh-faced and passionate staff at the till sometimes I’m best off ‘out back’. My daughters definitely agree with this as I get more heated over parents who surreptitiously encourage their child to read an entire graphic novel in the crime room - which is out of view - while they browse. And then the graphic novel gets placed back swiftly before the entire family leaves empty-handed. I don’t begrudge the read, of course, but it’s cheeky and unnecessary (there’s already a box of secondhand books for children to read). It’s these same parents who’ll most likely ask for a discount when a book looks a bit less than pristine, which often happens in the children’s section.

Another highlight of the weekend was a printers’ fair at Hay Castle which is literally a stone’s throw away. I pop across and it’s a hive of activity with the resident print group displaying their work and around 20 local printmakers. It’s a novelty of Hay that it seems to attract the traditional crafts of letterpress, bookart and woodcarving and if you get a chance, do visit the print room in the Castle. The fair was busy and I’m sure it’ll return next year. This print is by Francesca Kay. She’s got a point.

I’m especially partial to letterpress and our NB tote bags are designed by Prints of Hay Aidan Saunders.

It was really sweet and kind of a friendly person to leave an Easter treat for me on my desk. Small acts of kindness can make such a difference.

Of course a week is made up of more than just tech grumbles and a young shopper comes in to browse with her pet tortoise, Cookie, who has an outfit of their own.

The bank holiday weekend is approaching and the wonky pavements are beginning to be chockfull of visitors. Hay has an amazing capacity to absorb the few hundred extras who flood the town on high days and holidays and today is both as the sun is shining and its market day - always popular. We are well-stocked for the extra footfall and its a relief after the long, slow days of the early months of the year. But could it tip over into carnival? I overhear one visitor saying to a friend she’s with, ‘we’ll come mid-week next time’ and I have to concede that it could seem wearing navigating the hoards. How are the cafes coping? Shepherds queue is manageable and there are streams of ice-cream eaters milling the market square. When Shepherds ice-cream parlour opened in 1987 there were mutterings of ‘it’ll never work, ha! Who eats ice-cream in February?’ Well the Orbachs had the last laugh as they not only proved that people lapped up their sheep’s milk ice-cream 12 months of the year but also rolled the brand out to festivals far and wide. Under new management these days, the parlour serves lots of tasty snacks other than ice-cream, but it’s the full stop to many visitors day in Hay - a ‘shepherds ice cream’.

The bookshop has been heaving, at times I have had to close the door just to re-boot, and the sun has shone at intervals. The stocktake is behind me for another 12 months and in the end made some sort of sense (with quite a few adjustments). My small team of part-time staff has rallied and hand-sold books of many denominations over the four-day bank holiday, with books in translation and fantasy proving to be high-notes. Lots of nice children’s books gifted as Easter presents in lieu of eggs which was pleasing to see. Perhaps the window display inspired them?

And as Cookie came out of hibernation so, too, the streets of Hay are full of friends old and new once more. Oh, and the festival bunting is up!

So that’s my plan. Once a week, from the coalface that is being a shop-keeper in the small but surprisingly well-known town of Hay-on-Wye, famous for its internationally famous book festival and other smaller attributes - a Castle no less!

It’ll more than likely be about humanity as much as bookselling, although I will be as newsy as I can be about the books themselves as that is what I mainly care for (aside from a rescue lurcher and a couple of equally long-legged teens). People love Hay, overseas visitors swarm here in the summer months, and couples have been known to propose in one of the larger bookshops. It delivers on almost every level, particularly rain in the winter months.

Today started with a wobble when my shop door handle seized up and I was about to resort to removing it altogether (the lock, not the door). A customer who arrived in hi-vis on his trusty bicycle soon had screwdriver in hand and showed me how to fix it next time as well as sorting it out for now. And then proceeded to order his book and have a cuppa while perusing the travel guides to the next city he plans to visit. Joining him on the window seat was another regular customer, who keeps my non-fiction section in check. Both men shared a joke about leaving things behind (a hat in this case) and I realised that a quiet day in the bookshop is about more than the takings at the till. It’s about a quiet welcome and a genuine care for mankind.

Meanwhile, look at my Easter window! Crafted from recycled material and installed by a customer who had the idea and ran with it within three weeks. Golly I am so chuffed. Windows are a stretch for someone without any specific artistic ability and this one has already drawn much admiration. I’ll let you know how the first week of the Easter hols goes.

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Easter window by a North Books customer, installed this week.