Hardly anyone opens an independent bookshop because they're bored. It is simply too much work to start a small business out of indifference.
--Katie Clapham, Receipt from the Bookshop (June 15)
The 20th annual Independent Bookshop Week is currently being celebrated across the U.K. and Ireland. The Booksellers Association notes that the campaign "aims to highlight the vital role independent bookshops play in their communities, and to encourage consumers to shop for their summer reads with their local independent." Nearly 800 bookshops registered to participate.
Working with headline sponsor Hachette UK, the BA lines up authors each year to act as Indie Bookshop Week ambassadors. In March, the Bookseller reported that the 2026 ambassadors would be Kit de Waal, Katriona O'Sullivan, and Katie Clapham. Worthy choices all, but I really love Clapham's inclusion because she's also a bookseller.
"As a writer, bookseller, bookshop-owner and overall bookshop enthusiast, I couldn't be more thrilled to be an ambassador," she said upon her appointment. "I truly love independent bookshops; from the chic and glossy to the humble and chaotic; each of them are important to their community and vital to our society, and all of them are completely magnificent to me."
With her mother (aka Business Mum, or BM), Clapham is co-owner of Storytellers, Inc. in Lytham St Annes, England. She is also the author of Receipts from the Bookshop: A Bookseller's Year in an English Seaside Town (to be published in the U.S. by Morrow in September), which has been "described as a love letter to bookshops. Something I'd never get tired of writing!" she observed.
The book is based on her Substack, Receipt from the Bookshop, in which she collects small yet integral--as well as highly readable--moments in a bookseller's day.
I'm a fan. I like visiting her bookshop virtually. Among the many gifts on offer, her diary entries on patrons are sharply observant and often spark comparable memories of my own bookselling years: "Cool customer is browsing in the shop in an excellent coat..."; "A lady tells me about a local poet she recently saw in Blackpool. 'He did a poem about the town, it was called Shithole.' "; "A gentleman comes in to collect a book for his wife. 'I hope I've come to the right place' he says, producing one receipt that says Storytellers, Inc., and another that is for some dry-cleaning."
There are also moments from the job ("It's Friday and I am in the bookshop and I have BEATEN the delivery man (as in I was in here first, not like, GBH."); reality checks ("I feel like this Receipt is really low on actual content from today's business but absolutely nothing is happening!"); family connections ("One of Business Mum's dramatic friends calls in to tell me he's reading my book and that he thinks his wife's shortbread has been mentioned in it. I can't deny it!"), and so much more, including, of course, book recommendations.
In her most recent post, Clapham departed from her diary format after her first Indie Bookshop Week event as an author ambassador was canceled due to low ticket sales ("I am not embarrassed to say this because I understand how difficult it is get an audience for an event, and I understand that I am not a recognized name, with zero profile outside of this small corner of the Internet.").
She deftly turned her personal disappointment into a love letter for indies and call to action for readers, noting: "Bookshops, I love you. I'm saying it straight away because it's the feeling I have the most of when I think about you. I love you. I wouldn't ever want to pick a favorite bookshop, although I know it is not mine. As much as I love owning a bookshop, it does not compare to being a customer in a bookshop. Sometimes that is a drawback of working in a bookshop--there is work to be done and people who need you; things that stop you from simply 'being in a bookshop,' which I think of as a state as close to Nirvana as we can expect on this dry, dry, dry land....
"Plenty of people had no interest in that event at all, and that's fine, but if there were enough who wanted to but just didn't, that could have been the difference between it happening and not. That's sales lost for a shop, event stock that has to be returned and a cumulative nervous weight added to the decision on whether to book the next event. Buying books works the same way; the shop has to have the support and confidence to buy new stock, to stay open. This is just another example of how supporting independent bookshops is an active choice that has to be engaged. It's the extra seconds to remember to choose independent bookshops when convenience makes it easy to do something else. It's ok to have to work at that! Maybe it's muscle memory for you by now (and I know that within my readers, it is) but for plenty of people it's a novelty and we don't want independent bookshops to be novel."
And in the Bookseller on Wednesday, Clapham observed in an Indie Bookshop Week column: "We can't be shy or apologetic about it because, as much as it pains me to say it, the non-bookish world is not talking about bookshops, independent or otherwise, very often. I know this because, sometimes, I hear people noticing my bookshop in genuine disbelief, shocked that an independent bookshop could still exist in the year of our Claude and 2020-AI, 'everything everywhere all at once.' They are slightly mystified by our entire enterprise--a shop, just for books? 'YES, we scream during Independent Bookshop Week...."
My whole life as a bookseller has been informed by other booksellers, publisher sales reps taking me by the hand and showing me how to do the ropes, really being able to take any book that you love--and I think this is true for anybody, whether it's a reader, another bookseller--and ask, How did this book get into my hands? And that eventually will take you back to an editor."
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When an aspiring writer falls under the spell of a mysterious older woman, it sets in motion a precipitous chain of events in Leslie Bazzett's dazzling debut novel, Mia, an erotically charged suspense drama fueled by one woman's "fantasy of belonging." The narrator recounts an earlier period in her life, when she and her family temporarily relocated from their Minnesota home to a charming town in Mexico.
