The Good Library Blog

Someone else from the Grauniad doesn't like the fact that most people don't read metropolitan handjob fiction and whatever consistutes 'classics' this week. I should demand to know where Neville Cardus' cricket reports are these days and why the newspaper isn't still called the Manchester Guardian (only a failure of spirit would dictate that a national newspaper could only be produced in London in this day and age). There isn't a bookshop locally that holds one quarter of the range of stock of our very smallest library and I can't imagine many suburban or provincial library authorities are very much different.

Out of interest, perhaps Tim could tell us how many books the average branch of Waterstones stocks? It's always seemed to me, just on looking around, that bookshops in fact have far more books than my town-centre, so-called 'flagship', library.

Amanda. Thanks - it's fifteen years since I was at Waterstone's and in those days we believed that the name should only go above the door of a shop that was totally indulgent in literature and extensive ranges of academic titles and non fiction.

We wouldn't open a shop with less than 40,000 titles and the really good shops had 70,000 plus.. Of those titles about 85% would be 'backlist' which meant they were initially published more than a year before. That was Tim Waterstone's formula-- and it was the backlist which was by far the most important and successful part of the operation.

Shops like that (which were expensive to stock as you can imagine) could only survive where there was a substantial community of readers to use them. But, hopefully, they covered all tastes (except academic science which we could never address properly-- we were very good on arts and humanities, I hope. Regretfully not on science, even though that was my own field of study, initially anyhow!)

Prior to Waterstone's I worked at WH Smith and in those days the WHS shops ranged from about 8,000 titles to 25,000 titles, they probably still do. In their case about 30% was frontlist. So you can see from that exactly what Waterstone's was trying to do. It was trying to offer the extent of literature in the backlist of publishing as an alternative to WH Smith.. Of course, much later on, Amazon made a huge difference- but that's another story, as they say.

Well maybe my local Waterstones is very poor then Amanda because last time I visited it I couldn't find anything other than basic non-fiction (GCSE texts and revision guides in the most part) or multiple copies of bestsellers.

Our library carries a far wider range of books than the local book shop. We cover a wider range of subjects and we cover those subjects in greater depth.

Our smaller branches may not hold as much stock, but once again I think we beat them for breadth of subject areas.

I could claim that Waterstones has a very narrow and unbalanced range of stock based upon my personal experience but then I realise that one bookshop does not represent all.

This blog isn't about the history of Waterstone's -- but I left in 1992; 3 years after the aquisition of the company by WH Smith. In those 3 years we tried desperately hard to hang on to the values that had been the origin and the reputation of the company. The shops were large, mostly, and were in places that could sustain them. Much of my job during that time was fending off the pressure from WHS to reduce stock levels and effectively 'dumb down' and I hope we were, then, still quite good shops. But after I left, even though Tim (W) was still there for a while, WHS and then HMV influence gradually pervaded.

New shops were opened in places that were too small, the stock was reduced. the emphasis on back list declined. People became managers of the company who didn't understand the original values and over those years, many of the qualities have been diluted out of recognition.

Nobody can be more disappointed in all this than Tim Waterstone - whose name is still above the door (of which he was rightly so proud) - and he has to give explanations like this one every day. He did a wonderful job-- and it would be so good to bring at least some of the qualities he sought when he started his shops to public libraries. I know he thinks that, he has often told me and encouraged me in this work.