Reading & Libraries
The Minute Memoir at Worksop Library
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The Five Leaves banner is a familiar sight at many events – you'll see their stall in our libraries during the Inspire Poetry Festival and at our larger readings and panel events, at County Hall on the annual Inspire/Nottingham City Libraries Readers’ Day and at every significant book fair and literary shindig in the county. We asked Ross Bradshaw, publisher, bookseller and founder of Five Leaves, to tell us how he and his team are dealing with lockdown.
This photograph is what Five Leaves Bookshop looked like on the day we closed temporarily because of Covid-19. If a similar photograph was taken today the shop would look more like a warehouse, with the main table a packing area. You would see yawning gaps on the shelves, particularly in fiction, translation, LGBT and, surprisingly, art. While most of the staff are on furlough (with their wages made up) I walk in, early in the morning, and spend the day packing and mailing customer orders and "mystery parcels". This last are £50/£100 boxes. It's fun, it's reading and it's trade - increasingly being used because none of us can visit our relatives or distant friends. It's legit, the Government "allows and encourages" mail order. Everything we do is with advice from our trade association. It's safe - I walk in never coming near a soul then work in self-isolation with books. Often in untidy piles, and with bits of paper all over the place. No photos at the moment, please. Without anyone to tell me to tidy and no customers...
Life used to be just putting out books and some people would buy them. And organising events, lots of them. About a hundred a year. And doing bookstalls, sometimes in libraries. And knowing when publishers would publish and when deliveries would arrive. And knowing that libraries were open, and theatres and cafes and shops were open. And, more or less, people were safe.
While I pack orders - there's never the right size of cardboard, by the way, and when I get home my partner tells me there's brown tape on my jersey - the other worker not on furlough is working remotely to rebuild our website and planning online events, for now and for later too. Stuff that we never usually have time to do. One thing we are not short of now is time.
Ross Bradshaw
Five Leaves is Nottingham's independent bookshop, in the city centre. Follow them on Facebook or Twitter or contact them on bookshop@fiveleaves.co.uk to join their email list.
