The Best of Times

It's exactly ten years since the bookshop company I worked for - Ottakar's - was taken over HMV Media, who incorporated the shops into its Waterstone's chain. I was happy at Ottakar's. It was a company that valued individuality, not only tolerating the quirky and eccentric, but actively encouraging it. Ottakar's and I were a good fit.

The company culture came from its founder and managing director, James Heneage - a man who was the antithesis of the grey-suited businessman. Fiercely intelligent and disarmingly honest, he had an unusual background. Expelled from a famous public school, he went on to join the army at Sandhurst and was allegedly responsible for the only mutiny in his regiment's history, when he got his soldiers lost in a jungle.

I suspect that many of the anecdotes about James were apocryphal, but it wouldn't have surprised me if they were true. James was a larger than life character, with a clipped military voice that boomed across the room. During a visit to one shop in early December, James was dismayed to find that there were no Christmas decorations and bellowed at the manager "What are you? Some sort of Calvinist?!"

But underneath the bluff exterior, there was a great warmth and we all felt that he was on our side. I have met many politicians, actors, writers and artists, but few of them have had the charisma that James Heneage possessed. He was a natural leader.

I enjoyed the job because in addition to the mundane business of running a shop, I had the opportunity to hold events, write articles about authors and meet a variety of people at launch parties. Sometimes the encouters were quite surreal: a conversation about NCP car parks with Lee Child, meeting John Grisham in a medieval hall that looked like something out of Hogwarts, dancing with a very drunk Mrs Doyle from Father Ted, meeting a True Crime author who told me that he could kill me with his bare hands if he wasn't a Buddhist, discussing the book trade with Jacqueline Wilson whilst sitting on a merry-go-round, advising Katie Price what she and Peter Andre should read in bed together...it was all very amusing.

I also worked with some lovely people - bright, unpretentious, full of fun, mostly. Most of the staff went on to greater things, but a few would have struggled to find employment anywhere else; for example, one member of staff liked watching DVD boxed sets of Apollo landings in real time and also had a collection of music by Nazi swing bands (one dance hit was called 'Bomb England'), but they loved their books and were a real assett to the business.

When the company was taken over, the new owners said how much they valued our 'passion' and wanted to incorporate it into the wider business, but within a year my job had turned into a very dull admin role, with all of the important decisions made elsewhere. After 18 unhappy months, I decided to leave Waterstone's before they left me.

But rather than dwell on sad endings, here's a small celebration of what I loved about Ottakar's:

Partly out of devilment, but also in an attempt to boost sales, I held an event featuring dangerous and exotic animals during the school holidays. In hindsight, it could have ended badly, but luckily it passed without a hitch. This woman has a rather useless chameleon on her arm. Why hasn't it turned blue?

In this photo, I'm holding a tarantula, wondering what will happen it it jumps off and runs away.

The Science Museum decided that their existing bookshop was too dull and asked Ottakar's to come in and make it more 'visitor friendly'. Less charitable souls might say that we took a good academic bookshop and dumbed it down, but it went down very well with the Museum and I really enjoyed the challenge of setting up a shop in such a unique envionment.

I'm not sure if the Museum realised how little we knew about science - we were completely winging it - but I think we got away with it.

I was very flattered when James Heneage told me that I was the ideal man for the job, possessing the necessary tact and diplomacy to deal with the museum authorities. Later I discovered that four people had turned the position down before I was offered it.

We had to work with the existing fixtures and fittings, all of which were very drab, but managed to come up with something half decent. Unfortunately, the director of the museum didn't like the illuminated sign, as he felt that the phrase 'Adult Books' had unfortunate associations.

An Ingmar Bergman moment from a lovely weekend in Sweden, courtesy of one of my ex-booksellers from the Clapham branch, who let us use her flat in Stockholm. As much as I love books, it's the people that I valued most about the job.

In the Crawley branch, we held the longest ever Jacqueline Wilson signing event, which lasted for eight hours. This photo doesn't do justice to the length of the queue.

Even the most jaded, world weary bookseller would be hard pressed not to be moved by an event like this. Jacqueline Wilson was wonderful and made every child feel as if they had a special bond with her. It was quite terrifying when it started, as I had no idea that so many people would turn up. When some very 'assertive' mothers started to surge forward, I had to act quickly to avoid a punch-up.

In Ottakar's the ethos was that quirky, interesting shops were good for business. Staff were encouraged to think of innovative ways to display and promote books, which made the job far more interesting for them. Every shop I worked in had at least one talented artist who produced the most astonishing windows.

In 2005, I had to open a shop in Worthing at the same time that my father was dying. It was a challenging time, but in many ways it helped having something to focus on. It was the first time I'd had the opportunity to recruit a team of staff from scratch, so I decided to follow my gut instinct and pick people I'd be happy to go to the pub with. The result was one of the happiest places I've worked in.

The set-up week involved converting a bare shell of a unit into a fully stocked shop with 25,000 books within five days. Every day we worked for up to 12 hours, then went out drinking. No matter lively the evening was, everyone was back the following morning at 8.00 sharp, which was quite remarkable in some cases.

The takeover of Ottakar's wasn't a certainty. The bid had been referred to the Monopolies Commission and we spent the best part of a year wondering what our fate was going to be. But on a Monday morning at the beginning of July, I turned on my PC and saw an email that read 'Welcome to Waterstone's'.

My heart sank.

If I ever come into a small fortune, I will revive a branch of Ottakar's just for the fun of it. I suppose the name is copyrighted, so keep an eye out for a bookshop called Ottokers, O.T.Takars or Otto Kerr's.

Booksellers

After my recent post about publishers' sales reps, it seems only fair to turn the spotlight round to the booksellers. What type of people work in a bookshop? Are they passionate, slightly unworldly bibliophiles, who live and breathe books? Or are they a bunch of slackers, who break out into a cold sweat at the prospect of having to do a proper job?

During a very dull moment in a waiting room, I tried to remember everyone I'd ever worked with. I got to 200 before my memory started to become hazy. I felt slightly guilty when I realised that I hadn't given some of my ex-colleagues a second thought since we'd last met, but I expect they'd probably say the same about me.

The weekend staff were particularly hard to remember. The boys, who all seemed to be studying 'A' level English, merged into one amorphous blend of earnestness and skin complaints, although there were a couple who amused me by telling dirty jokes (which I then passed on to the reps).

The girls were easier to recall because some of them had recently friended me on Facebook, in a barrel-scraping attempt to pass the 500/1000 friends mark (I quietly 'defriended' them after a suitable period, but I doubt that they noticed).

However, they weren't 'proper' booksellers. The weekend staff were merely taking a brief pitstop on their way to a glittering career (at least, that's what they told me). The idea of becoming a full-time bookseller horrified them almost as much as the thought of their parents having sex.

When I asked one girl what job she wanted to do, she replied: "I don't know yet, but I do know one thing: I'm not going to work here." She later became our floor manager.

As for the proper booksellers, in the early days of Waterstone's, the slackers ruled the roost. For them, bookselling was a continuation of university life, with its constant shortage of money and cramped bedsits; redeemed only by brilliant conversations with like-minded people and long periods of inertia. The hours weren't as great, but at least you didn't have to wear a suit.

Anyone who actually wanted to be a bookseller was regarded with a mixture of contempt and suspicion. Was that really the limit of their ambitions?

In hindsight we were probably awful. Our hatred for the customers - those people who dared to interrupt our conversations and ruin our displays by buying the books - was only exceeded by our contempt for a head office who lived in an ivory tower and dared to suggest that we should only stock books that seemed likely to sell. Philistines!

Oddly enough, the customers seemed to like our bolshy attitude and inappropriate clothing, so when one male member of staff decided to create a bondage outfit out of dustbin bags (complete with holes for the nipples) and serve at the till, no-one batted an eyelid.

The till-points of Waterstone's contained many frustrated writers, artists, teachers and media people, waiting for their dream job to come along. Surprisingly, their hopes weren't always in vain. After a year of displaying no discernible work ethic or talent, X would effortlessly drift into a key role at the British Council, whilst Y suddenly became a production assistant at Channel Four. How did that happen?

The Waterstone's staff uniform, circa 1993

At the end of five years of watching other people move on to better things, I felt that I ought to create an illusion of progress and left to run an independent bookshop. At the time it seemed like a sound move, but I quickly discovered that I was working for the Arthur Daley of bookselling, with van loads of dodgy stock mysteriously appearing on the shop floor overnight. I didn't want to be Terry McCann, so I started job hunting.

In 1996, a new bookselling chain - which seemed to have risen without a trace - was advertising for managers. After a rather unconventional interview with James Heneage, the managing director, I became a 'manager-in-waiting' at Ottakar's.

Ottakar's, which was a nationwide chain of smallish shops in market towns, was a revelation. I soon realised that outside London, booksellers were a very different breed. The staff I met actually seemed to take a pride in their work and would happily break-off a conversation if they saw that a customer needed help. I felt as if I had joined a group of evangelical Christians: wide-eyed, enthusiastic and committed. Some of them even wore ties.

I've no doubt that the good morale was a reflection of the leadership, but I also noticed that outside London, booksellers were generally more motivated than my former colleagues. They weren't passing through on their way to something better. This was their career.

Keeping up with such enthusiastic people was exhausting, but I did my best.

At Waterstone's most of the staff I met were in their 20s and all of them were graduates, as Tim Waterstone refused to employ anyone without a degree (by doing this, he missed out on some very good booksellers).

Ottakar's was very different, with a mixed bag of people whose ages ranged from 16 to 65. Some of them had degrees, but many had simply joined when they left school or moved across from a completely different area of retail. Sometimes the recruitment criteria were a little too lax, for me at least.

It took a while to get used to seeing a copy of the Daily Mail (or worse) in the staff room and when I spotted well-thumbed copies of novels by Patricia Cornwell and Terry Pratchett, I realised that there weren't going to be many fist fights for a proof copy of the latest Umberto Eco.

My shop in Crawley

I was at Ottakar's for ten years and, during that time, came to recognise similar types in every branch I ran or visited. Every shop had its high flyer (usually under the age of 23) who seemed more competent than the manager and was usually destined to be their boss in four years' time. Some managers felt threatened by them. I just saw an opportunity to take a long holiday without worrying about the shop.

These high flyers were usually counterbalanced by one or two no-hopers who could spend an hour discussing Robert Jordan's 'Wheel of Time' series with a customer, but still hadn't unpacked yesterday's delivery. They seemed to think that promotion was a simple award for long service and could never understand why some young upstart had been promoted over their head.

In Ottakar's, although the booksellers came from a variety of backgrounds, the one thing they all shared was a genuine love of books and a morbid fear of having to sit at a desk for eight hours a day. Bookselling provided a variety of work centred around something that actually mattered, which was not something that the local call centre could offer.

The last day of Ottakar's, Worthing, before it was converted into a Waterstone's

At my branch of Waterstone's (which was probably atypical) in the early 90s, the attitude was more cynical. The staff had no loyalty to the company and regarded their jobs as a temporary expedient. They might enthuse over certain titles, but the idea of being passionate about all books would have been viewed as absurd. Indeed, neatly hidden away at the till point was a small sticker that said "Books are crap".

However, in their own way, the arrogant slackers of the early Waterstone's years were often very good booksellers. Freed from the constraints of the career ladder, completely indifferent to the concerns of area managers, they ordered what they liked. One buyer was chastised by his manager for buying ten copies of a £100 Ansel Adams book, but they all sold within days

Fifteen years on, the new owners of Waterstone's were keen to turn their backs on an era in which the easiest way to identify a member of staff was to look for the scruffiest person in the shop. Graduates were no longer essential. The main qualification was a passion for selling. To the horror of many, a couple of managers had been recruited from Gap and Burger King!

There was a clear message: we don't think bookish people are always good at selling. In today's tough commercial climate, we need proper retailers.

(This YouTube video is a brilliant satire of Borders and the pre-Daunt Waterstone's - sadly embedding has been disabled, so follow the link and skip the advert after five seconds)

In my darker moments, I wondered if they were right. Perhaps the traditional booksellers were just unemployable misfits who'd enjoyed years of sanctuary in the book trade. However, after three years of 'retailing', with planograms, loyalty cards and a staff training scheme called 'Get Selling', Waterstone's was on its knees and almost disappeared from the high street, until a Russian oligarch came along and bought the company from HMV.

Today, things have come full circle. Unable to compete on price, booksellers are returning to their traditional role as curators of the huge, bewildering range of books in print. However good Amazon is, they will never be able to match the fiction-in-translation table at the Brighton branch of Waterstone's.

During the next decade, many bookshops will go to the wall - that much is certain - and booksellers will become an endangered, exotic species. However, the best bookshops should survive (high street landlords permitting).

But to return to the initial question: who becomes a bookseller? Looking back over 20 years of bookselling, I don't think I could say that there was a typical bookseller. There were some quiet, bookish types (who often left to train as librarians), but there were also louche bohemians, alcoholics, artists, drug dealers, ex-nuns, former policemen, future policemen, writers, rock musicians, reiki therapists, scientists and poker players.

Misfits. All very different, but all round pegs that didn't fit into square holes. With fewer bookshops on the horizon, things are going to get much harder.

The best of times, the worst of times...

The spring of 2005 was one of the best and worst times of my life. On the one hand I was opening a new branch of Ottakar's - only two minutes' walk from the beach - and had recruited a wonderful team of staff. On the other, my father was slowly dying in hospital and several times a week, I had to drive 150 miles to visit him.

The combination of a dying parent and a heavy workload was a recipe for disaster and when, in the middle of it all, my wife discovered she was pregnant and started to feel really ill, I could have felt overwhelmed by events. However, it was work that saved me. By keeping busy and focusing on opening my new bookshop, I managed to stay sane.

It might seem counter-intuitive to repress grief, but it worked for me. In the short-term, at least.

There was something special about the shop in Worthing. There was an incredibly good morale and even though the age gap between the oldest and youngest member of staff was 48 years, it didn't stop us all having a good time at the pub.

When we opened, we had less than a month to prepare for the launch of the sixth Harry Potter novel. We were busy enough just trying to get the shop running smoothly, but a new Harry Potter book was too good an opportunity to miss, as a successful launch would really put our shop on the map.

I say 'our shop' because I think everyone felt a sense of ownership. I certainly did everything I could to encourage that view and it paid dividends. In the four weeks between opening the shop and the publication of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, everyone worked at a feverish pace to prepare for the launch. As a result, the evening was a triumph.

If you wonder why I'm writing about something that happened four years ago, it's because I've just discovered how to convert the video I made of the launch into a format that can be uploaded to YouTube.

I hope this film captures something of the fun we had at Ottakar's. One of the booksellers used to be a drama teacher and was in his element as the master of ceremonies. I'm not a Harry Potter fan, but it would take a heart of stone not to enjoy an evening like this.

If you can't face the full five minutes, jump to 2'30". I came up with a fairly novel solution to the problem of suddenly producing the books at midnight: