Book sales soared as people reconnected with reading

BOOK sales continued to rise last year despite the coronavirus pandemic lockdowns, according to sellers in Henley.

More than 212 million print books were sold nationwide, which was the highest figure in a decade and worth £1.82 billion.

Sales were driven by booming demand for crime novels, sci-fi, fantasy, romance and personal development titles.

Hilary Redhead, manager of the Bell Bookshop in Bell Street, Henley, said the shop’s sales reflected the trend.

“People seemed to really reconnect with their reading during the lockdowns and this does appear to have continued,” she said.

“We were 30 per cent up on 2020, excluding Henley Literary Festival sales, and have gone into 2022 in very good shape.

“People bought a very diverse selection of books. Our main sellers were Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell, Vaxxers by Sarah Gilbert, The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman and, to show that our customers still have a sense of humour, Matt Cartoons 2021.

“We also noticed a growth in children’s books, especially the younger ages. Notably, Squirrel’s Snowman by Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler, and the rediscovered German classic The Train Mouse by Uwe Timm.”

The shop, which stocks more than 20,000 titles, was shut for more than three months at the start of 2021, but continued to trade online.

Ms Redhead said: “We added an online shop to our website, joined Bookshops.org, an affiliation of independent bookshops nationwide, and offered click and collect.

“We made many local deliveries on foot, by Mini and sometimes even on a Vespa.”

Jonkers Rare Books in Hart Street specialises in finding rare and unique books, helping clients to enhance their collections.

Christiaan Jonkers, who runs the shop with his wife Sam, said: “It has been an interesting time for us.

“The service we provide is very different from a traditional bookshop and the online trade that threatened to kill independent bookshops had zero effect on us.

“That is because we offer a level of expertise that you can’t replicate or find on the internet.

“The last year has been good in terms of sales but challenging as well — the most important thing that we do is not selling books but finding them in the first place.

“We don’t acquire books that we haven’t seen first and to do that we have to travel all over the world and obviously we couldn’t do that during a global pandemic.

“We also do exhibitions all over the world, which we couldn’t do last year, so there were definitely challenges but the traffic on our website has increased massively and more and more people have been looking at it.”

Diana Way, who runs Richard Way’s rare and second-hand bookshop in Friday Street, said that the sales remained stable despite the pandemic.

She said: “We really rely on people from outside of Henley coming here for a day out and having six or seven hours in town and that’s how they find us.

“We are always acquiring new books and that was the same during the lockdowns.

“We focused on that because we have a minor online presence and we had to close during the lockdowns.”