Heron Books
Our June Bookshop of the Month, Heron Books opened its doors in 2022 in Clifton Arcade and recently moved to Regent Street in Bristol. This small bookseller spends their days talking books with their customers and running several bookclubs a month, catering to their readers tastes. We caught up with Lizzie to ask why she opened the bookshop, what’s the best part of running it and what’s to come in the immediate future …
1. What made you want to go into bookselling, and what is your favourite part about it?
The simple answer is of course a love of books – of reading, of re-reading, of talking about books, of discovering new authors or once-lost gems. The best moments in the job are when you are chatting to someone and you connect over a book, perhaps one you haven’t thought of for a while, and then you each begin recommending other things to each other, some of which you’ve read and some of which you have never even heard of. Those conversations happen several times a day and always leave me with a spring in my step (and yet another pile of books to read)…
2. What types of books have your customers been buying recently? Have you noticed any trends?
As a small independent, one of the lovely aspects of our shop is the breadth of what people are reading. We sell a wide range of books and often a bestseller for us is shaped by what we – my colleague Harry and I – happen to be really excited about that day. Recently we have been a bit obsessed with On the Calculation of Volume and lots of other translated fiction. With the centenary of Mrs Dalloway, and as a huge Virginia Woolf fan, I have been enjoying chatting to people about Woolf and recommending Harriet Baker’s Rural Hours and Mark Hussey’s Biography of a Novel.
3. You run several book clubs that cater to all tastes – how do you choose the books that get discussed?
We have five book clubs, endless spreadsheets, loads of lists, always make notes of things we have read that we think will be good choices in the future… Then we totally ignore all of that and choose a book that gives us ‘the feeling.’ You know. The Feeling.
Having said that, we do tend to offer the groups a choice of two each month but lots of them say they like having the choice taken out of their hands. And we are careful about making sure we read a range of races, genders, contemporary and older books etc…
4. What’s it like running a bookshop in Bristol?
Wonderful! Bristol has had a brilliant increase in independent bookshops in the last few years and we’ve joined a brilliant, kind and fun gang of book obsessives. I feel like Bristol is made up of lots of small villages so the bookshops in each area very much have their own identity. And it’s a city where I would say a lot of people care about shopping locally and supporting small businesses, so we have been able to build a business that is part of and fosters community which is exactly what I hoped for.
5. And last, but not least, do you have any exciting plans for the shop in the coming months that you would like to share with us?
Well, we have only just moved to larger premises so that’s been pretty huge! I started the shop in a tiny space in the Clifton Arcade, which was wonderful, but the ability to have a store room and space for a kettle has been rather life-changing. We have lots of events coming up – already planned into January 2026 so there is something to look forward to every week. In June, we partner with Foundry Editions for Independent Bookshop Week which will be a great fun celebration of all that they are doing to support Mediterranean translated fiction in extremely classy covers…