‘It was devastating – no-one was in central London’: how do you sell rare books in lockdown?
For many of us, a trip to an antiquarian bookshop is as much of a treat for the senses and a boost for the spirits as a stroll round Kew Gardens. And although the pandemic has left Britain’s rare-booksellers slightly foxed, the good news is that they're working hard to keep their businesses ticking over while their shops are shut during Lockdown Two.
Pom Harrington is one of London’s most successful antiquarian booksellers, as the owner of Peter Harrington – the eponymous business founded by his late father, which started life as a market stall on the King’s Road and now comprises shops in Chelsea and Mayfair, with 40 staff. “If we were reliant on casual walk-in trade, we’d be busted – Mayfair is just dead. But I’d say normally only a quarter of our turnover comes from that, so we’re quite well-hedged.”
February was the worst month of the year – that was when the stock market crash curbed the spending power of Harrington’s high-end clientele – but since then, trade has ranged from good to excellent.
“A lot of our business is finding books, writing to an existing customer and saying, ‘We know you really well and I think you’ll like this book’ – so that aspect of the business continues. Some people are having to be cautious with their money and are saying ‘no’, but a lot of our customers are fine, and also have plenty of time on their hands.”
It helps that Peter Harrington has a well-established web presence – “we invested heavy early in the website, compared with other shops”. The promise of vaccines is cause for celebration too: “I’m also chairman of the Rare Book Fair in London, which is supposed to be held at the Saatchi gallery at the end of May. I’m feeling a damn sight more confident about that now”.
Ed Nassau Lake works at Jarndyce Antiquarian Booksellers, specialists in 18th- and 19th-century literature, with a plum location opposite the British Museum. Except that it’s plum no longer.
The problem is not just that tourist traffic has dwindled; it’s also that where once visitors emerged from the museum to find Jarndyce staring appealingly back at them, they now leave by a rear exit a block away, thanks to the Covid-induced one-way system. The upshot is that the shop’s doors have been closed since March – and a “soft reopening” planned for early November has been scuppered by the new lockdown.
Nevertheless, Nassau Lake reports that “business is still quite robust. I think we’ve learned to communicate with our customers a lot more.” With book fairs moving online, there’s a good deal more remote buying and selling – “we’ve spent a lot more time with our eyes going square”.
And yet it’s one of Jarndyce’s pleasingly old-fashioned aspects that has contributed to its success: “We still print our own catalogues and send them out in hard copy. We don’t just send out one among the scores of emails that people get bombarded with every day.”
There are problems. With fewer book fairs, people are taking more of an interest in online auctions – which means more people competing for fewer books and driving prices up. “We've found it’s been very difficult to buy. Auction prices have gone through the roof: there was a Harry Potter first edition sold for $55,000 hammer price [in October].”
Another headache is that booksellers now can’t rely on the seductive power of a book in the flesh – “the tactility of old books, and the smell that gives off history as much as the touch does” – and Nassau Lake argues that a physical shop is necessary to interest newcomers in the rare-book world.
“Young people come into the shop asking if they can touch the books, and that’s the first time they appreciate that, with care, you can actually handle rare books, even though they might be valuable. Until they realise that, they’re not going to be interested in collecting them. And that aspect doesn’t exist at the moment, unfortunately.”
What is it like to be starting out in the antiquarian book business in this pandemic year? I spoke to AN Devers, who opened The Second Shelf – an antiquarian shop in Soho that, uniquely, specialises in books by women – two years ago this month.
Devers is very social media-savvy – “this has been good for the trade as a whole, at least, in pushing everyone into getting online; everybody needed to be on Instagram anyway” – and initially created a real buzz about her shop. One wheeze has been a “surprise first-edition” scheme, with customers paying for a book without knowing what it is.
“Last week, somebody got a Gentlemen Prefer Blondes signed by Anita Loos in the mail, and they were delighted and shared it on social media, and then other people find out.”
He adds: “Most rare book stores have very high-end clients. I had a few and they were increasing, but what paid for my store was the people coming from all over the world to visit it, arriving at my shop off the plane because they had heard about it. They didn’t necessarily spend a lot of money but there were enough of them that they covered the cost of the shop.”
Devers was about to hire full-time contracted staff for the first time when Covid struck. She rapidly set up a website for the shop, a move she had hoped to introduce some time soon in any case. “It had what would normally be a very successful launch, but it doesn’t recoup the costs that were lost by the store. And putting individual books up online is incredibly labour-intensive: the photography, the descriptions.
“We tried to reopen the store when the Government encouraged us to, and that was a devastating cost – no-one was in central London, our customers weren’t visiting.” For now, the shop is “basically an online shipping and receiving area” which she runs with one part-time staff member and some freelance help.
How does she feel about the future? “I don’t know if my shop is viable in the current location or not. Maybe one option is to go to a more visible place. I wanted to grow my space, but sometimes you have to downsize in order to get into the right place.
“The advantage we have over the more established shops is flexibility. I’m optimistic that my business will be OK.”