Gloucester Road Books
Our January Bookshop of the Month is Gloucester Road Books, an independent bookshop in Bristol who focus on small indie press publishing, fiction in translation and narrative non-fiction. We chat to Tom the owner about how he picks the books they sell, their loyal and knowledgeable customer base and what’s to come in the future!
When you set up Gloucester Road Books in 2021, what was your vision?
I wanted it to be a bookshop that would entertain and challenge. This is a bookish community, so people here are really receptive to us recommending books and authors they are not familiar with. We have a significant focus on exciting indie press publishing, lots of literature in translation, and an eclectic range of narrative non-fiction. We really want to encourage people to browse and read as widely as possible, to follow their curiosity and pick up books they know nothing about.
What is it like running a bookshop on one of Bristol’s legendary roads?
Gloucester Road is such a brilliant high street, there is just about everything here. People are (rightly) proud of the road and are very supportive of its small businesses. There is a really strong sense of community with the other traders and local residents. We see so many familiar faces every day and get to build our knowledge of what specific people read and respond to. It’s wonderful to feel so embedded within a community.
We love the idea of a translated literature book club – tell us more! How did you come up with the notion and what has been the feedback from customers?
It’s been great fun! We wanted a theme for the book club so that people had some sense of what kind of books they would be reading if they signed up. We’ve read some absolutely amazing books, and the discussions have been really good – open and candid while remaining amiable! We generally have a good healthy disagreement about each book we read, there have been very few that were universally loved, and none (so far!) that haven’t had any defenders. So far we’ve read books translated from Bulgarian, Catalan, Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish, Finnish, and next up is Danish.
How do you go about choosing the books that line the shelves?
With much agonising and gnashing of teeth. We have a relatively small space here, so we have to be pretty judicious with our ordering. Every month we pore over the lists of new releases and select books that we think will add something to the shop. This is really where that principle of wanting to entertain and challenge plays out. We have a good sense, after a few years of bookselling here, of the kinds of books that we think will be well received but it’s also really important to us that we encourage people to read broadly, to pick up books that they might not have expected to choose but are fascinated by. It’s always a joy when one of these books really takes off. One of our bestsellers over Christmas was A Philosophy of Walking by Frederic Gros which was exactly that.
And finally, do you have any exciting plans for the shop in the coming months you would like to share with us?
We have some wonderful events being planned for February and March. These will start to be announced in the next couple of weeks. We’re also planning to move around some things in the shop to make more space for our poetry section, so that will be expanding significantly in the next couple of months.