A touch of radicalism is a fine business strategy

There is something familiar yet unfamiliar about Housmans, a 70-year-old radical bookshop at the south end of Caledonian Road in King’s Cross, central London. It feels a bit like a throwback to a student meeting.

Stashed away downstairs are cardboard banners with “Fight McLibel censors” and “No taxes for war” slogans. Yet it is far more spick and span than that suggests.

Sales are up 40 per cent on the previous year and the shop is expanding. Big sellers this year have included Yanis Varoufakis’s ‘The Global Minotaur’, the Penguin-reissued ‘Communist Manifesto’ and Naomi Klein’s ‘This Changes Everything’. A recent crowdfunding round raised money to enable them to carve out a basement room to house fiction and art titles.

Making a living as a purveyor of political books is not easy. Yet in the past few years Housmans has had some success and is profitable. It is not alone.

Five Leaves, which opened in Nottingham in the Midlands in 2013, has made a small profit. Other members of the Alliance of Radical Booksellers have also reported a lift in sales.

Nik Gorecki, the co-manager at Housmans, puts this down to a variety of factors, including the “Corbyn factor”. “Politically, there’s a new optimism emerging.”

He senses a growing student awakening. “There’s an economic divide in the country. If you miss the housing ladder ... a lot of economic policies are taking money from younger people and trying to win older voters. There’s a growing frustration among younger voters.”

That is not the popular characterisation of students. They are usually described as boring, materialistic, focused on studying rather than radicalism to get a job to pay off their student debts.

“That’s wrong. It’s never been true that students were apathetic. There’s a growing frustration and desire to engage,” he insists.

There is also a growing anti-Amazon customer base, he insists. “People recognise that Amazon is an unethical business and [are] recognising the value of independent bookshops.”

Ross Bradshaw, the owner of Five Leaves, observes that many of his customers “avoid Amazon because of its reluctance to pay tax and its employment practices”.

He also believes that paying the living wage is important to many of his customers.

Amazon, the online retailer, recently opened a shop in Seattle, which industry observers believe is less about making money on the store than marketing.

Gorecki says: “They’re sitting on so much money they can afford to lose money on bookshops. Their model is: drive people out, expand in every which direction.”

The bookshops have also benefited from the novelty factor of e-books dying down.

“There was a moment when everybody wanted new gadgets and they enjoyed buying them. That has waned and people have recognised they like books.”

In the UK, the value of book sales has this year increased more than 5 per cent on the year before, according to Nielsen BookScan.

Yet this growth in sales at Housmans is not just happy circumstance. It has been a result of hard work. Like other bookshops, Housmans has tried to entice people across the threshold by holding events.

Recently, it held a workshop on novel-writing but there have also been speakers, including Naomi Klein and Paul Mason, a journalist.

As Bradshaw points out: “We can’t just wait on customers to pitch up — no indie bookshop can — we do a lot of work outside the shop, often outside shop hours. We might be radical but we are all booksellers.”

The definition of what it is to be radical changes, notes Bradshaw. “In the 1940s, Communist party bookshops would sell calendars with pictures of Stalin on them. The radical bookshops of the 1970s and 1980s were resolutely hostile to the Soviet Union. Things come and go.”

One thing is important, however, says Gorecki: to keep the focus on books. “If you read the trade papers they say diversify away from books, get in other products with bigger markups. We’ve gone the other way, which is to fill the shop with books and just do books. And I think that’s worked for us.”

They do sell tea towels, however, although they draw the line at coffee and carrot cake. “People come to bookshops for books and the more books you can throw at people, present to people, the better,” he adds.

Douglas McCabe, the chief executive of Enders Analysis, the media analysts, notes that Waterstones is replacing its Kindle merchandising areas with books, not coffee shops. “That’s because the chain has calculated it will make more money from more books; that’s the direction of consumer demand.”

Yet here is the rub. Housmans is able to survive because its rent is not commercial. The building was originally bought by the Peace Pledge Union after the Second World War. The campaigning group was helped by a priest who contributed his inheritance.

It is now owned by a trust, which also oversees Peace News, a newspaper published upstairs. The not-for-profit bookshop pays rent but not at commercial rates.

Five part-time employees — also called “co-managers” — are aided by volunteers, not always the most biddable kind of workforce.

McCabe points out: “For small, independent bookshops it is of course difficult to generate a handsome profit. The pressure from rising high-street rents is the biggest challenge.”

Thousands of bookstores have closed down due to high rents and the business model requiring shops to pay upfront for the books. Bradshaw notes that some bookshops in the 1970s and 1980s were helped by “friendly leases ... not because they were radical but because they were community bookshops involved in literacy schemes”.

Large sums have been offered for the Housmans building. King’s Cross, once seedy, has been gentrified, with the likes of Google turning the area into a tech hub. The building’s trustees refused to sell.

Despite its low rent, it has in the past been close to closing. This has forced it to embrace commercialism.

They have joined with other booksellers to launch the Bread and Roses award for radical publishing as well as the Little Rebels prize for children’s books.

Gorecki says he does not want to go too far down the road of commercialisation however. “The shop has a remit, to promote the books, to get important books in people’s hands and spread the political culture.”

The financial crisis and austerity has, he says, made people curious about economics. “It’s affecting their lives and people have left it in the hands of the experts and a lot of people are waking up and realising I need to understand this myself. The idea that [economics] is a science, hopefully, is being debunked.”

Financial Times