Barter Books is a second-hand bookshop in the historic English market town of Alnwick, Northumberland, owned and run by Stuart and Mary Manley. It has over 350,000 visitors a year, 40% of whom are from outside the area, and is one of the largest second-hand bookshops in Europe. [1] It is considered a local tourist attraction [2] and has been described as "the British Library of second-hand bookshops." [3]
The bookshop is in the Victorian Alnwick railway station, designed by William Bell and opened in 1887. [4] The station was in use until the closure of the Alnwick branch line in 1968; [5] Barter Books was opened in 1991. It is open every day including bank holidays except for Christmas Day.
The shop also houses a cafe called The Station Buffet which serves hot food all day to customers at tables in the original tiled waiting rooms of the railway station. [6]
The shop is notable for its use of a barter system, whereby customers can exchange their books for credit against future purchases; standard cash purchases are also available.
In 2000 the owner discovered, in a box of old books bought at an auction, [7] a World War II poster from 1939 with the message "Keep Calm and Carry On". The shop owners framed it and hung it up by the cash register; it attracted so much interest that Manley began to produce and sell copies. [8] [9]
In late 2005, Guardian journalist Susie Steiner featured the replica posters as a Christmas gift suggestion, raising their profile still further. [10] [11] Other companies followed the Manleys' example, and the design rapidly began to be used as the theme for a wide range of products. [12] Mary Manley later commented, "I didn't want it trivialised; but of course now it's been trivialised beyond belief." [12]
Alnwick is a market town in Northumberland, England, of which it is the traditional county town. The population at the 2011 Census was 8,116.
WH Smith PLC, trading as WHSmith, is a British retailer, with headquarters in Swindon, England, which operates a chain of high street, railway station, airport, port, hospital and motorway service station shops selling books, stationery, magazines, newspapers, entertainment products and confectionery.
W & G Foyle Ltd. is a bookseller with a chain of seven stores in England. It is best known for its flagship store in Charing Cross Road, London. Foyles was once listed in the Guinness Book of Records as the world's largest bookshop in terms of shelf length, at 30 miles (48 km), and of number of titles on display. It was bought by Waterstones in 2018.
Waterstones Booksellers Limited, trading as Waterstones, is a British book retailer that operates 311 shops, mainly in the United Kingdom and also other nearby countries. As of February 2014, it employs around 3,500 staff in the UK and Europe. An average-sized Waterstones shop sells a range of approximately 30,000 individual books, as well as stationery and other related products.
Black Books is a British sitcom created by Dylan Moran and Graham Linehan, and written by Moran, Kevin Cecil, Andy Riley, Linehan and Arthur Mathews. It was broadcast on Channel 4, running for three series from 2000 to 2004. Starring Moran, Bill Bailey and Tamsin Greig, the series is set in the eponymous London bookshop and follows the lives of its owner Bernard Black (Moran), his assistant Manny Bianco (Bailey) and their friend Fran Katzenjammer (Greig). The series was produced by Big Talk Productions, in association with Channel 4.
Hatchards is an English bookshop claiming to be the oldest in the United Kingdom, founded on Piccadilly in 1797 by John Hatchard. After one move, it has been at the same location on Piccadilly next to Fortnum & Mason since 1801, and the two stores are also neighbours in St. Pancras railway station as of 2014. It has a reputation for attracting high-profile authors and holds three royal warrants granted by King Charles III, Queen Elizabeth II, and Prince Philip respectively.
The Alnwick branch line is a partly closed railway line in Northumberland, northern England. A heritage railway currently operates a mile of the line, which originally ran from Alnmouth railway station, on the East Coast Main Line, to the town of Alnwick, a distance of 2+3⁄4 miles (4.4 km).
Grange-over-Sands is a railway station on the Furness Line, which runs between Barrow-in-Furness and Lancaster. The station, situated 15+1⁄2 miles (25 km) north-west of Lancaster, serves the town of Grange-over-Sands in Cumbria. It is owned by Network Rail and managed by Northern Trains.
Dillons was a British bookseller founded in 1936, named after its founder and owner Una Dillon. Originally based in Bloomsbury in London, the company expanded under subsequent owners Pentos in the 1980s into a bookselling chain across the United Kingdom. In 1995 Pentos went into receivership and sold Dillons to Thorn EMI, which immediately closed 40 of the 140 Dillons bookstore locations. Of the remaining 100 stores, most kept the name Dillons, while the remainder were Hatchards and Hodges Figgis. Within Thorn EMI, Dillons was placed in the HMV Group, which had been a division of Thorn EMI since 1986. EMI demerged from Thorn in August 1996, and Dillons-HMV remained an EMI holding. Dillons was subsumed under rival chain Waterstones' branding in 1999, at which point the brand ceased to exist.
The Aquarium L-13 was a contemporary commercial art gallery run by Steve Lowe. It was originally based in a Georgian building in Bloomsbury, London, and then moved to Farringdon. It worked with artists, musicians and writers, and specialised in more unorthodox punk-based art work, including Jamie Reid, Jimmy Cauty, Billy Childish, Sexton Ming and artists associated with the indie label Stolen Recordings. It closed in December 2008, and re-opened as the L-13 Light Industrial Workshop in May 2009 in Clerkenwell.
Cash carriers were used in shops and department stores to carry customers' payments from the sales assistant to the cashier and to carry the change and receipt back again. The benefits of a "centralised" cash system were that it could be more closely supervised by management, there was less opportunity for pilfering, and it freed up the assistant to attend to the customer and perhaps make further or better sales.
Alnwick railway station was the terminus of the Alnwick branch line, which diverged from the East Coast Main Line at Alnmouth in Northumberland, Northern England.
Higginbotham's is an Indian bookstore chain and publisher based in the city of Chennai. The company's first bookstore at Mount Road, Chennai is India's oldest bookshop in existence. The company's second bookstore in Bangalore, located at M. G. Road, opened in 1905 and is the oldest existing bookstore in the city. Since 1949, Higginbotham's has been owned by the Amalgamations Group.
Keep Calm and Carry On was a motivational poster produced by the Government of the United Kingdom in 1939 in preparation for World War II. The poster was intended to raise the morale of the British public, threatened with widely predicted mass air attacks on major cities. Although 2.45 million copies were printed, and the Blitz did in fact take place, the poster was only rarely publicly displayed and was little known until a copy was rediscovered in 2000 at Barter Books, a bookshop in Alnwick. It has since been re-issued by a number of private companies, and has been used as the decorative theme for a range of products.
"Bookshop Memories" is published in 1936 by the English author George Orwell. As the title suggests, it is a reminiscence of his time spent working as an assistant in a second-hand bookshop.
Coldstream railway station served the town of Coldstream in Berwickshire, Scotland although the station was across the River Tweed in Northumberland, England. The station was on both the Alnwick to Cornhill Branch which ran from Alnwick to Cornhill Junction on the Kelso line near Coldstream and the Kelso to Tweedmouth line.
The book trade in the United Kingdom has its roots as far back as the 14th century, however the emergence of internet booksellers such as Amazon partnered with the introduction of the e-Book has drastically altered the scope of the industry. Book retailers such as the Borders Group have failed to adjust to these changes, thus there has been a steep decline in the number of operating traditional and independent bookshops. However, still heavily influential on the trade globally, British publishers such as Penguin Books and Pearson remain dominant players within the industry and continue to publish titles globally.
Albert Henry Spencer, often referred to as A. H. Spencer, was an Australian bookseller. He was a specialist in antiquarian bookselling and Australiana and established the Hill of Content bookshop in Melbourne, one of that city's "finest bookshops". He has been called "one of the last links with an heroic age of Australian bookselling and collecting".
Alnwick Lionheart is a railway station situated on the edge of the Lionheart Enterprise Park on the outskirts of Alnwick, Northumberland. It is the western terminus and operational base of the preserved Aln Valley Railway which is currently working to rebuild the original Alnwick branch line from there to Alnmouth station. The station was constructed on a different site from the original Alnwick station due to the construction of the A1 Alnwick bypass which removed a section of the original trackbed on the edge of the town as well as the construction of buildings on the original station site and some of the trackbed on the approach to it.