Radical Bookselling in the UK 1970-2000

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Radical Bookselling History Project: Dave Cope, John Goodman, Rick Seccombe, Maggie Walker

From the early 1970s there was a rapid expansion in the number of radical bookshops in the UK, with at least one in many large (and some small) towns and cities. The number peaked in the 1980s and then declined: few have survived, although some new ones have been established more recently.

The four of us who set up and run the Radical Bookselling History Project were all involved in that wave of radical bookselling and decided it was a history that needed to be recorded and told.

Our contention is that these shops made significant contributions to the growth of radical social and political movements that occurred in this period. Not only did they provide a crucial last link in the production, distribution and consumption of radical literature and other artefacts in their multitude of forms – books, pamphlets, newspapers, magazines, posters, badges, records and even board games – but in pre-internet times they were also social spaces where activists met and held both public and private events.

The group held a conference in Manchester in October 2019 with 37 attendees who had worked in radical bookshops or distributors and since then has produced eight bi-annual Newsletters (pdf only) covering the earliest radical bookshops and the most recent, and extending even to radical publishing and distribution. Apart from our Newsletter, which we think is a world first, as a result of our work articles have also appeared in other journals.

In addition to this writing and publishing we are building an oral history archive by interviewing other shop workers, and in the process encouraging them to write histories of their shops. We are also attempting the difficult task of tracking down surviving records of the shops and ensuring they are preserved in publicly accessible archives.

We have participated in public events such as the 2023 London Radical Book Fair and the Quiet Revolutions event at London’s Barbican Centre in 2022.

Much of our work is in collaboration with other organisations, including On the Record, The Alliance of Radical Booksellers, The Working Class Movement Library and London’s Senate House Library (over the digitisation of the Radical Bookseller) and we look forward to a fruitful link with the Bookselling Research Network.

The Conference Report and Newsletters are available at: https://www.leftontheshelfbooks.co.uk/research.php