Niche tastes

Independent Bookshop Week has just ended and the buzz even ahead of the tills closing on Saturday was that this year’s UK-wide event would surpass previous records, with 739 indies taking part nationwide against 716 last year. To put that in some context, the figure for 2019 was only slightly above half that. Maybe we fell in love with books again during the pandemic and transferred that love to the places that sell them when life began to return to normal. Either way, city dwellers will find it hard to miss the slow but steady re-integration of independent bookshops to their streets – often with cafes attached, and lively programmes of events and readings.

But it isn’t just the cities the indies are colonising. Far from it. London dominates, unsurprisingly, but data shows that in Scotland it’s the south-west which leads the way – also unsurprising given that it hosts Wigtown, home of the Wigtown Book Festival and Scotland’s acknowledged book town. There’s an almost equally good spread across the Highlands and Islands.

A newer development in the world of independent bookshops is the rise of outlets catering to niche tastes or particular genres, a sure sign of confidence in the market. With the boom in the romantasy genre and the rise of TikTok as a means of........

© Herald Scotland