It was a dark Saturday night in April 2013 in the Scottish Borders. My wife and I were staying with her parents in a holiday cottage and we had found a large collection of leaflets and guests' suggestions for what to do. Activity leaflets, tourist guides and maps, all useful stuff. And a leaflet for the Borders Book Trail.
This is great, a guide to the independent and secondhand book sellers set up by the sellers themselves, detailing their location, what they sell and their opening times. In the course of a week we visited all of the bookshops listed that remained open, and managed to buy something from all but one (and we really tried to find something to buy there).
The shops were good too: an independent bookshop and café in St Boswell's that had a deli counter; a cavernous seondhand bookshop in Innerleithen, the same town that has the working print museum of Robert Smail's; and adventure books in Peebles alongside a museum dedicated to John Buchan. The guide helped us get around and see other bits of the Borders that we might not have travelled too.
And it got me thinking, wouldn't it be nice to have something similar for Yorkshire, a Great Yorkshire Book Trail. There are lots of places I buy books from in Yorkshire that I tell other people about, my colleagues at work and friends all have their own recommendations, all I need to do is collect them together and then I can produce my own leaflet. My very own literary classic. I wonder if there are any prizes I can submit it to.
As the seasons progressed through 2013 I thought about this and mulled it through. It is clearly a very good idea to share locations of recommended bookshops, every one knows where to get books from, and there's plenty of booksellers in Yorkshire. And yet, why just Yorkshire? Why just books? And why just a leaflet?
Why just Yorkshire? Most of the time I have bought a book I have been either in my home county or travelling. Part of the joy of travelling is finding new places, new bookshops, new books. And not all bookshops are in Yorkshire, not all readers are here; why not write about finding bookshops wherever I travel from my home country. This also allows me to take recommendations from readers about places to check out further a field.
Why just books? For me, finding a good, well stocked secondhand book shops goes almost hand-in-hand with finding records. That week in the Scottish Borders was completed with a few days in Edinburgh, we swapped the booksellers for music and booksellers. No more Middle of Nowhere Bookshop, welcome to Leith's Elvis Shakespeare. Here I managed to buy, amongst other things, a Robert Greaves book and a Housemartins vinyl that urged me to 'take Jesus, take Marx, take hope'. This was a fantastic shop, full of gems. (While we were there the lovely Elvis Shakespeare staff managed to 'do a High Fidelity' by playing the Clash's first lp and persuaded my wife to get it). So, this will be books and records and where I found them.
Why just a leaflet? While the Borders Book Trail was useful, someone had carefully put a pen 'x' through the details of two shops: closed, no more. Collecting together the recommendations and finds online allows for information to be kept relatively up-to-date, and any changes can be made without the need of a ballpoint pen.
As it is now April 2014 I decided to put this project in motion. I will write about the places I've visited to find books and records from this point onwards. It will also be about other places that take my interest, like the youth hostels I have stayed it, cafés visited, and so on. I intend to start out with only taking recommendations for bookshops and record stores, though let's face it, plans rarely remain the same once life is involved.
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