Jarrold’s book department holds numerous events such as author signings and your monthly book club. What are your favourite bookish events and why?

The easy answer would be the events where we sell the most books: there were 800 people in the queue at a Tanya Burr signing session here a few weeks ago. If you don’t know who Tanya Burr is, neither did I until about six months ago – but she sells a lot of books. Beyond that, authors talking to authors can be particularly fascinating. A couple of months ago we sold books at an event with Helen Macdonald (of H Is For Hawk fame) and Jeanette Winterson (of rabbit pie fame) in conversation. They were both warm, revealing and insightful and clearly sparked off each other.

From your local bestsellers list, it looks like your readers love reading about Norwich. How are you able to meet the demand for local interest titles?

By having the best East Anglian book range in the world. That might sound slightly big-headed (and to be frank there probably aren’t a lot of bookshops trying to compete with us in that endeavor) but Jarrolds is known for local books and customers come to us for them. Authors of local interest books also come to us, often the self-published, no ISBN, stock in the garage kind of authors whose titles wouldn’t make it to the shelves of the big chains. If they’ve written the right kind of book we welcome them with open arms.

Can you recommend three favourite books to add to a summer reading list?

The Shepherd’s Life by James Rebanks – a memoir of sheep farming in the Lake District so gritty, honest and alien to the way most of us live and work it reads like something from another country, or another century.

The Honours by Tim Clare – a fine, strange novel that’s hard to describe, but probably somewhere between Mervyn Peake and Dennis Wheatley. It also happens to be set in north Norfolk.

Edward Thomas: From Adelstrop to Arras, a Biography by Jean Moorcroft Wilson. The first full biography of Thomas for a number of years sheds some fascinating new light on this strange, brooding poet and countryman. The author has already written books on Sassoon and Rosenberg, so WWI poets are clearly her thing.

What are the benefits of being located within a large department store?

Where do I start? A brand that’s known and trusted throughout the region; cafes and restaurants providing perfect event venues; a marketing department that dresses windows, creates point-of-sale material, promotes events and does a dozen other things better than we could do them ourselves; finance, HR and all the other back office functions to take the strain of their specialisms and allow the bookselling team to focus on customers and books.

You offer a whole array of unique services to your customers including providing ‘A Year in Books’ and ‘Library Building’. Do you feel it is important to offer additional services that traditional bookshops may not offer?

I think most bookshops recognise the importance of going the extra mile for their customers. We have been offering a bespoke service since we first opened in 1936 and have been tailoring it ever since. Our mixture of new and rare books means that we are able to draw on the whole ‘history’ of the printed word and our customers appreciate that. Our ‘Year in Books’ uses that knowledge and means that we can match books to people with that added element of surprise.

Spring brings with it many new and exciting titles, what are three of your personal favourites?

Undoubtedly ‘A Curious Friendship’ by Anna Thomasson which looks at the close ties forged between Edith Olivier (the writer) and Rex Whistler (the artist and illustrator) and their circle of friends. It draws on her hugely evocative letters and journals. I am also enjoying the correspondence between Bernard Berenson and Kenneth Clark – those titans of the art world. The letters are at once illuminating, gossipy and affectionate. Thirdly, ‘Captain of Dragoons’ the seventh Carey novel by Ronald Welch. Originally published in the 50’s it is a powerfully written adventure set at the time of the Battle of Blenheim. Ostensibly for children its historical accuracy and taut writing makes it a novel for old and young alike.

One of your services includes building private libraries. What does your own personal library look like?

With four children, all voracious readers, we ran out of shelf space some time ago. It is not so much a library (wish that it were) but myriad collections reflecting our advancing years and changing tastes. The important thing is that there are books everywhere and on all manner of subjects so that one can never complain of being bored.

Why do you think the bookshop experience remains so important to readers and book lovers?

There is a misconception (possibly amongst non-readers) that reading is a solitary pursuit. The popularity of reading groups belies this as does the social nature of the bookshop. What better place to discuss the merits (and demerits) of a title than the place where it was bought? Our customers have as much influence over what we stock as we do and are as vocal about their likes (and dislikes) as we are. Heaven.

The events held by Topping & Company set them apart from your average bookshop, aiming to ‘provide rich illumination into an author’s work and help deepen the experience of reading’. In these events the audience is very much encouraged to ask questions directly to the author, whilst sitting back and enjoying a complimentary cup of tea or coffee, which is always available in Topping & Company stores! The St Andrews branch has recently organised a talk by Alex Salmond, the former First Minister of Scotland, at the local university to discuss his recently published book. Other events at the bookshop itself include monthly poetry nights, that offer ‘the chance to explore and discuss writers at the forefront of contemporary poetry’. The poet for April is Annie Freud, winner of the Glen Dimplex New Writers’ Award for poetry. She is the daughter of Lucien Freud and the grand-daughter of sculptor Sir Jacob Epstein.

From your website we can see that you have a great selection of educational titles and work closely with some schools in the community. Why do you feel this is important?

We have always nurtured our relationships with the whole community. All who work in the shop have a love of reading which we want to share. That’s why going into schools with authors and taking book displays hopefully instils this into young readers.

Are there any recent academic or educational titles that stand out to you?

We sell a lot of non-fiction – politics, history and economics are amongst our best sellers. Any books by Owen Jones, all Yale London titles including East London Pevsner. I really like From Bow to Biennale: Artists of the East London Group.

Where is your favourite place to read?

I love reading anywhere, but particularly in bed.

The Newham Bookshop has been going strong for over 35 years now, what’s your secret?

We have been going for over 37 years and believe that our very strong links with our ever changing diverse community is key. We listen to our customers and hopefully reflect their book requirements in our stock. We have tried to make the shop a welcoming place, not intimidating; for many people coming in it will be the first bookshop they have visited.

What makes the Tate Liverpool Bookshop unique from other gallery bookshops?

We offer the best range of art books, merchandise and gifts in the North West! Tate is also a publisher in its own right. This includes exhibition catalogues, books on artists and children’s titles and we stock many of these in the shop.

How does the bookshop accommodate and prepare for a new exhibition coming to Tate Liverpool?

We work closely with the Gallery to ensure we support each exhibition with books and product whenever possible and will often produce items such as postcards, prints, mugs and fridge magnets specifically for exhibitions. We regularly change the design, layout and colour of the shop to give extra impact. For our larger exhibitions in the summer we also have a dedicated exhibition shop.

Being surrounded by such beautiful books every day, you must want to take them all home! If you had to pick your top 3, which books would you choose?

That’s a difficult choice! We’ve had some great titles in stock recently. I particularly like A Conspiracy of Ravens from the Bodleian Library. It’s a compact and beautifully illustrated book of collective nouns for birds.

Our current exhibition ‘Transmitting Andy Warhol’ has a great introductory guide on one of the most famous artists of the 20th Century. It’s been written by Tate Liverpool Assistant Curator Stephanie Straine so is worth a special mention!

Anyone who visited Liverpool over the summer couldn’t fail to have been captivated by the Giants Spectacular, three huge life-like puppets who walked around the city to commemorate WW1. On the Shoulders of Giants captures my memories of this city wide performance perfectly.

What inspires you in your job?

Every exhibition brings a new challenge or opportunity and I really enjoy being involved with the whole process. It’s also rewarding to know we are making a valuable contribution not only to the Gallery but each visitor’s experience here.

Going Green? Bristol has been named European Green Capital for 2015 – will your shop be reflecting this in events or special displays in 2015?

We regularly work with the Bristol Festival of Ideas, who will be doing a lot with The European Green Capital events. I am sure we will be hosting a wide range of author events here in-store and are likely to theme some of the books we will present to our customers through our window displays and our wide selections of offerings in store.

Foyles as a chain has been steadily growing in recent years – what’s special about Foyles in general, and the Bristol shop in particular?

To the Bristol branch we try to bring what is unique about Foyles – going the extra mile to find the most interesting books to our customers attention – while at the same time remaining firmly grounded in the Bristol community. We take great pride in our extensive children’s area and are dedicated to encouraging children and teenagers to enjoy reading. Foyles has been in existence since 1903 and with good reason – we are enthusiastic, passionate and very dedicated to making the finest books available to our customers.

This shop is also home to a café, overlooking Quakers Friars. If you could take a reading break later, what book would you choose, and what would be the perfect coffee/cake accompaniment?

For my reading break I would either take the new book of Christopher Le Brun’s latest abstract paintings, they have the intensity of Turner’s late works and the abstract power of Clifford Still and have a complete sense of emerging from the tradition of painting. Or Ever Yours: The Essential letters of Vincent Van Gogh a beautiful book which demonstrates the creative power of Van Gogh as a writer as well as an artist.

Our coffee beans are supplied by the brilliant Bristol roastery Extract, so I would pick a latte.  We try to make the milk a velvet sensation to complement the subtle yet rich flavor of their perfectly roasted beans. Also I’d probably have a muffin.

Dream customer? If you could choose anyone to walk through the door now, who would it be – author/celebrity/big spender – and do you have any notable browsers (that you can tell us about!)?

Our dream customer is anyone who is willing to share their and our passion for books and ideas. Every customer who shows enthusiasm about reading, young or old, is a dream customer to us.

Sneak previews? What can we look forward to at Foyles Bristol to cheer up the winter months of this New Year?

In the New Year you can look forward to more of what we are famous for – dedicated customer service and strong product knowledge, as we strive to discover the most diverse and interesting books to present to our customers. Also, delicious cups of tea and coffee.

Yale Rep with Darren Tanner, manager, Foyles Bristol branch.

The shop has a particularly large stock, with a wide, varied and, most importantly, good quality selection. Along with up-to-date shelves, the bookshop also hosts boxes filled with discounted books, so there is sure to be something to suit every need. The shop has a lively poetry section and actively participates in London’s poetry community by hosting readings, panel discussions and other events. Combine this with regular writing workshops and a book group, and the Brick Lane Bookshop has all the makings of a real literary hub. A strong sense of fun is also in evidence: the shop is infamous for hosting the Alternative Booker Prize, with the tagline ‘We’re not bitter. Not at all’. As the representatives for the award-winning Margellos World Republic of Letters series, it’s always heartening to find a bookshop with a special section for fiction in other languages, and this one allows the discerning reader (in their words) to ‘come for Camus, find Allende and discover Tuelle’.

The shop’s location close to Shoreditch High Street station makes it easy to find, and a trip can be combined with visits to other Brick Lane legends like the Beigel Shop (open-24 hours a day since 1855), and Rough Trade East, one of the last record stores left in East London. So, next time you find yourself in the area why not take a walk on the East Side?

Interview with Jan Green and Paul McLoughlin

What is special about a gallery bookshop and how is it different from a general bookshop?

PM: A gallery bookshop will always be inspired by the collection and exhibitions held within the gallery. ‘Curated’ had been the buzz word in book selling for a while but gallery shops have always been highly curated, with carefully selected books reflecting and enhancing the museum they sit within. Books also have to fit in with postcard, prints and a lot of other products. A perfect shopping basket in a gallery store could include something like a book, a postcard and a fridge magnet.

JG: With a bookshop on our doorstep, we have a strong voice as publishers in decisions about display and promotion. And it works in both directions – through conversations with retail staff (and a bit of discreet eavesdropping on the shopfloor!) we learn more about our customers.

How do you cater to the expectations of your audience?

PM: With so many different types of visitor to the gallery, of all ages and with differing levels of interest and knowledge of art, we have to make sure we have books that appeal to everyone. With regular buying meetings with publishers we make sure we have the latest children’s, art history and artist monograph titles arriving into our stores, enhancing our core stock. We also ensure that our bookshop staff have the information they need to answer any book related questions our customers may have.

JG: As the National Gallery’s publishers we have to publish for a very wide range of readers – so that includes exhibition catalogues, guidebooks (some in foreign languages for our many overseas visitors), and for scholars, our collection catalogues.

What is your favourite painting in The National Gallery?

PM: At the moment I keep going back to look at Gustave Courbet’s Still Life with Apples and a Pomegranate. Painted in 1871-2, while Courbet was imprisoned after involvement with the Paris Commune of 1871, it’s a simple subject painted with immense skill. Saying that, the answer to this question could easily have been Jan van Eyck’s Portrait of a Man (Self Portrait?), Caravaggio’s The Supper at Emmaus or The Wilton Diptych. In every room of the Gallery there’s fantastic painting.

JG: It would have to be either Thomas Jones’s A Wall in Naples, which looks amazingly modern, or Correggio’s Madonna of the Basket, for its beautiful colouring, but either of them would look great on my wall.

From the point of view of the bookshop, what is the most exciting exhibition that has been held in The National Gallery?

PM: The Leonardo exhibition in the winter of 2011 was phenomenal. On every day of the exhibition  queues would start forming at 7am, by 10am the queue had stretched from the entrance to the exhibition all the way through to the other side of Trafalgar Square. It was an incredibly busy time where we sold 72,000 books, including 42,000 of the exhibition catalogue. If, during the Rembrandt exhibition, we see anything like we saw during Leonardo then we’ll be in for an exciting next few months.

JG: In terms of numbers, it has to be Leonardo, but the recent Making Colour exhibition was also a huge surprise – visitors loved the range of books and merchandise, and all of it sold incredibly well. We’re also very excited about the forthcoming exhibition, Rembrandt: The Late Works, and we’re very proud of our accompanying book, which we expect to sell extremely well.

We asked Catherine, owner of the New Bookshop, a few questions about this fabulous independent

What is special about this bookshop?

The New Bookshop is a very special independent bookshop, originally opened by my parents in 1968 and still at the same address, but greatly extended as more property to the rear was acquired. We have a lovely slate floor, with various literary words inscribed on the surface, drawing the customer right through the shop to where our dedicated children’s section & coffee shop can be found. As we are situated right in the centre of town, we are at the heart of the community and a regular meeting place for all sorts of customers. With two vibrant fiction book groups, a cookery book club, regular children’s storytelling & author events, we are doing our bit to encourage lots of book reading in our locality.

If you could go for coffee and cake (in your café Food For Thought!) with one fictional character, who would it be?

I would love to share a coffee or hot chocolate with Harry Potter!

What is your favorite place to read?

I like reading in bed best!

What inspires you to sell books?

Inspiration to sell books comes from the vast choice of books that we actually carry, or what my reps are telling me about, reading lots of proofs between us, we have great first hand knowledge when it comes to hand selling particular titles that we love. I like visiting other bookshops to see what they are doing. Reading to our youngest customers every week at story time is lovely as they all enjoy coming along and joining in and soaking up the atmosphere of a bookshop.

Can you recommend a book for a rainy (Cumbrian) day?

A few book recommendations of titles I have enjoyed recently: Invention of Wings by Sue Monk Kidd, Bone Clocks by David Mitchell, This is where I am by Karen Campbell and Shotgun Lovesongs by Nickolas Butler.

Dream customer – celebrity/writer/public figure?

Just anyone who wanted me to select and sell them the books for their own library!

Interview with Tara Spinks of Lutyens & Rubinstein Bookshop

What inspired you to make a career in books?

I pretty much fell into it accidentally, when an old employer of mine asked me to set up and run a children’s bookshop for him. I did that for two years, and then moved to Waterstone’s Piccadilly and Sundays at Lutyens & Rubinstein, before finally taking on the assistant manager position at L&R in spring 2011.  But looking back, I think I’ve always secretly been a bookseller – I spent my work experience and internships at ad agencies and magazines re-arranging their bookshelves into alphabetical order, and recommending books to my colleagues.

What is special about Lutyens & Rubinstein?

Every book in the shop is there because somebody loved it – when the shop first opened, the owners (literary agents Sarah Lutyens & Felicity Rubinstein) canvassed everyone they know for a list of ten books they wanted to find in the shop, which is how most of the backlist titles were chosen.  For new books, our shop manager Claire Harris has an incredible knack for finding hidden gems that are perfect for our customers, and an almost uncanny ability to recommend the right book for the right person (which is the heart of our bespoke Year in Books Service, where she chooses a book a month for over 100 lucky recipients, each one different).  It’s a small shop, so every book has to deserve to be there!

Do you have any early memories of reading?

I was always a kid with her nose in a book, and titles like The Tiger Who Came to Tea, Each Peach Pear Plum and The Famous Five have some of my most vivid memories from childhood – in particular, the picnic in Wind in the Willows is so clear in my mind that I might as well have been there on the riverbank with Ratty and Mole eating ‘coldtonguecoldhamcoldbeefpickledgherkinssalad frenchrollscresssandwichespottedmeatgingerbeerlemonadesodawater’ and so on.  One of the best things about being the children’s buyer at L&R is that I can keep a lot of the books I loved from my own childhood in the section and pass them on to the next generation.

Aside from Lutyens & Rubinstein, what is your favourite bookshop – anywhere in the world?

I’ve always loved Foyles, and I think their new flagship shop is amazing. As a bookseller, it’s incredibly exciting and inspiring to see other brilliant booksellers doing well and innovating.

Dream customer: if you could choose anyone to walk through the door now, who would it be – celebrity/royalty/big spender?

We get some pretty amazing celebrity spots at L&R, and I’ve struggled occasionally to keep cool in the presence of some very familiar faces! I do always enjoy it when authors come in looking for recommendations, and I’d love to chat to someone like Sarah Waters about what she’s reading and what she’d like to read.