Maggie Walker, John Goodman, Dave Cope: Radical Bookselling History Project.
Radical Bookshops
We have personal experience as booksellers in different shops in different towns in the late 1970s-80s and have been working together (with a colleague Rick Seccombe, who died in 2024) over the last 5 years collecting oral histories and written accounts of radical bookshops of that period.
The description ‘radical bookshop” is a broad one. There were specialist bookshops – gay, feminist, black, anarchist – but most stocked a broad range of material including from these four specialities. They might be called intersectional today. There was another category we usually call ‘community bookshops’, though all radical shops tried to serve their local geographic community. These shops were mostly based in London, tailored their stock to this community, which usually had a large BAME population, and they often published books and pamphlets for these communities. They often had associated educational, literacy and reader-writer programmes. Centerprise in Hackney was the largest of these. The two large London black bookshops, Bogle L’Ouverture and New Beacon, were major publishers as well. There were bookshops set up by political parties or groups covering the whole spectrum of the left at the time – Labour, Communist, Trotskyist and Maoist. Despite their own identities, most of the larger party shops would usually carry a good range of gay, feminist, black and anarchist titles. Some bookshops were linked to whole food businesses. And there were a handful of shops that specialised in modernist culture, especially literature, but also stocked some radical books and magazines. There is some debate over how radical “new age” or drug-orientated shops (‘head stores’ in America) were, with their individual approach to liberation, and we have excluded these. Some radical shops did have new age (mind, body, spirit) sections as they could be profitable. Most bookshops also ran bookstalls at events to take their publications to their audience and some groups had no premises but ran bookstalls.
One feature that distinguished radical from mainstream shops was the prominence given to magazines and pamphlets. There was an upsurge in radical papers and journals, some of which at the more academic level were later taken up by mainstream publishers. And some of the mainstream shops, notably the chains, did start selling some socialist, feminist and black journals. Even W H Smith who generally had a negative approach to radical publishing did put their toes in the water over support for the Feminist Book Fortnights and experimented with distributing Spare Rib, Marxism Today, New Socialist, Gay News and even a three-issue trial with Community Action in Newcastle.
Another contrast was that radical shops sold a large number of non-book lines. This included posters, badges, records and cassettes, cards, mugs, jewellery – all political, of course. These were usually more profitable than books.
Community Hubs
Most radical bookshops were also a local hub for the radical movements in their area. As well as selling literature and related material these shops served a crucial role in supporting local activist networks in pre-internet times. Printed material was the primary mode of broadcast communications. Beyond that, it was all about personal contact and radical bookshops provided the perfect location for that. Some had a meeting place on the premises, such as a cafe or a room that could be hired for events. Others, without such a space, sometimes used the bookshop itself as a venue for events. The walls and noticeboards were peppered with posters, announcements, petitions, requests for help or money, or a room in a shared house. In several cases, a community newspaper (they too multiplied and thrived in that period) was put together in a radical bookshop meeting room. They were a crucial part of local radical networks making them even more memorable to people today and historically significant.
What was involved?
Most of the people involved in these bookshops had no experience in the book trade or in business. It was a steep learning curve. Bookselling at that time was very labour-intensive. Learning what publications were available involved time spent in sympathetic bookshops and trawling through magazines to record details of books. Many radical publications were from the USA. Importing wasn’t always plain sailing. Parcels of books may be intercepted by Customs Officers and several booksellers who’ve contributed to our oral history archive report on stock damaged in the process. The Manager and Directors of specialist gay bookshop Gay’s the Word were raided by police and faced a possible prison sentence when prosecuted under outdated obscenity laws in 1984.
Infrastructure – FAB/FRB
The radical book trade had a membership organisation. This was initially called the Federation of Alternative Bookshops, open only to collectively run and non-party bookshops. After a 1980 ‘Working Together’ Conference in York it changed to the Federation of Radical Booksellers open to all radical shops and this lasted into the early 1990s. Today there is the Alliance of Radical Booksellers, which arose out of discussions in 2010. It currently has 54 listed members, which includes some on-line and some second hand-businesses, as well as ten survivors from the earlier FRB.
There was also a trade journal – the Radical Bookseller – which ran to 78 issues between 1979 and 1992. We are working with the Senate House Library at London University and the Barry Amiel & Norman Melburn Trust to get this digitised. The RB was sold by subscription but four issues that were stand-alone lists of shops, publishers and magazines (all radical of course) were sold separately. The RB published a Directory in book format in 1992 and published two books: Starting a Bookshop and Making the Connections: Radical Books Today.
A third feature of the FAB/FRB era, as we call it, was the series of Bookfairs – Socialist (which Bookmarks sustained), Radical Black and Third World, Feminist and Anarchist. These are covered in an article in the Radical Bookselling History Newsletter issue 9.
The numbers – how many bookshops?
The Radical Bookseller stated in 1980 that there were 100 radical shops in the UK and their Radical Bookseller Directory listed 103 shops in 1992. However, less than half were actually members of the Federation of Radical Bookshops (FRB): its 1982 minutes list 44 member shops, dropping to 34 members in 1987. There is a historical listing of radical bookshops available on the research pages of Dave Cope’s website (www.leftontheshelfbooks.co.uk).
A few shops, particularly those affiliated to the Communist Party, had started before the 1970s e.g. Collets and Central Books. Central published a history in 1999 on its 60th anniversary. Central Distribution Books continues to this day, as a distributor of books and magazines. Some shops have survived from the 1970s: Freedom, the anarchist bookshop and publisher, has roots going back to the 19th century; Housmans, which has been continuously open since 1959; Bookmarks, the Socialist Workers Party bookshop, since 1974; October Books since 1977 and News from Nowhere in Liverpool, which is run by a feminist collective, celebrated 50 years of trading in 2024. News from Nowhere attributes this longevity to having bought their premises using donations from supporters and sympathetic loans at the end of the 1980s. October Books, too, bought its premises, in 2018.
Other shops closed in the 1990s due to the change in the political and broader economic climate, pressures of increased rents, the end of the net book agreement and changes in bookselling. The mainstream shops broadened their stock to include feminist and gay titles and the range and publisher discounts available to chains such as Waterstones added to the pressures on all independent shops. There were personal issues too. As the shops became more established, their workers became more skilled and knowledgeable, helped by skill and knowledge sharing between the increasingly numerous shops. However as time wore on recruits with the same level of commitment became harder to find and the existing workforce became weary and in need of a less strenuous and more lucrative working life, one of the contributing factors in the movement’s decline.
Finance
We have little information about how the shops were financed. It is undeniable, however, that these shops were often under-capitalised and survived on the ‘sweat equity’ of their workers (ie free, or under-priced, labour). Our oral histories include descriptions of wage rates pegged to the level of ‘the dole’ (unemployment benefit) and even of working with no wage while claiming the dole. There is some evidence of appeals for donations and of committed radicals able to provide loans or capital. Some shops obtained a small grant from their regional Arts Council and some used government employment schemes to help pay salary costs. Some shops obtained contracts to supply libraries, sold greetings cards and other merchandise which had a better margin, stocked student textbooks outside their normal stock parameters and many stretched credit to the point of being on ‘stop’ with some publishers to improve their financial position. The dependence on Christmas sales was the same for many radical shops as for others.
Very few financial records have survived. Jane Cholmeley’s recent book, A Bookshop of One’s Own, is valuable because it provides access to the financial records of Silver Moon. The records of Lavender Menace in Edinburgh are held in the city’s archives.
Ownership, structure, ways of working
Some shops were private businesses, owned and run by one or two individuals, others belonged to political parties, but we believe that the largest category was those with a co-operative structure, either as a worker co-op (i.e. owned by the workers) or owned by the local community. A 1987 FRB meeting minutes state that 17 of the 34 shops in attendance were ‘co-op or collective’, 3 were ‘non-co-op/collective’ and there was no information on the remaining 14. The FRB guide to setting up a bookshop describes collective working:
In a collective all workers should be equally involved in policy and decision-making, ranging from who’s going to make the tea to whether to buy a new shop. Most collectives have regular meetings to discuss issues, usually once a week, and at these meetings the members try and reach consensus before taking a decision
Our interviewees and other sources describe the personal and business challenges of this ideal. The 1970s had seen an upsurge of interest in democratic ownership and control, both by workers and communities. At the time many local radical and progressive organisations ran collectively – many still do. The bookshops were the social enterprises of their day, although ‘political enterprise’ is a better fit for a radical bookshop.
Many of the shops were in, or near, university towns and cities, many of the workers were graduates and many of the customers were students. The implementation of the Robbins report of 1963 had resulted in a huge expansion in higher education, the number of students roughly doubling each decade, from 100,000 in 1960 to nearly a million by the early 90s. Most of the founders and workers, as recent graduates, were young (in their 20s). The workforce became gender-balanced over time as the sexual politics of the time played out within collectives.
Other factors fed the growth in radical bookselling, including the wider political and social turbulence of the 1970s such as the miners’ strikes in 1972 and 1974, the first national women’s liberation conference in 1970, the three-day week, four general elections, Bloody Sunday in Derry in 1972, the Angry Brigade, Little Red Schoolbook and OZ trials in 1971-1972 and so on. Also the new politics of literacy, including worker writers and community publishers, with which some shops had links – selling, and even publishing, the community publications.
Research issues
Identifying radical bookshops has been difficult. Even with the FAB/FRB records, there are problems. Minutes or reports of conferences were very variable in quality and length. Quite a few potential shops who had contacted the FAB and which appeared in Newsletters did not materialise, with some unable to find or afford premises, some remaining as bookstalls. And some shops were very, very short-lived. Some shops seem to have disappeared leaving little trace. On a recent foray into the FAB/FRB archives, Dave discovered one shop he hadn’t come across in thirty years of recording them – Grapevine in Hastings.
Our work
Our group builds on the conference we organised in October 2019. The conference report, nine Newsletters (so far), a bibliography on the radical book trade and a listing of radical bookshops are all available on the research pages of Dave Cope’s website (www.leftontheshelfbooks.co.uk). We would like to see equivalent groups looking into the history of radical publishers and at radical bookshops in other countries – Scandinavia, Germany and the US probably had a good number. Dave is working on a multi-volume history of the Radical Book from 1780.
We welcome collaborations and articles for our newsletter. Join our mailing list for our twice-yearly online newsletter. Contact us via rb*@ph*******.coop.