THIS WEEK


Bookshop Spotlight Five Leaves Bookshop


Five Leaves Bookshop ? 14a Long Row, Swann’s Yard, Nottingham NG1 2DH


With 100-plus events held in-store each year and a potential upsize on the horizon, Nottingham-based indie Five Leaves is going from strength to strength


th Melina Spanoudi @mspanoudi R 08


oss Bradshaw loves opening parcels. This is not what you might expect to hear from the founder of


Notingham’s radical Five Leaves Bookshop, which has had a vibrant and eventful 11-year life. Almost a year on from when a former British soldier was jailed aſter being found guilt of preparing to commit a terrorist atack on the store, Bradshaw tells me how the Five Leaves Bookshop came to be—and what it has become for its communit.


26th July 2024


The opening of parcels—or the “cut and thrust of bookselling”, as he calls it—was what Bradshaw missed when he leſt the local, independent Mushroom Bookshop, which also published some books. He carried on with the publishing aspect aſter his departure, releasing titles across crime fiction, social history and Jewish secular culture at his “reasonably successful small press”, Five Leaves. He was also on the board of a bookshop and helping to organise two festivals in Lowdham and Leicester, but he missed selling books in a brick-and-mortar bookshop.


“Mushroom had closed a few years aſter I leſt and Notingham cit had no other independent bookshop,” Bradshaw says. Readers were showing interest in the tpes of books that he wanted to sell and the radical bookselling landscape was starting to shiſt. “And I was geting older, so it was now or never,” he adds. He found the premises in the cit centre and set up shop. Today, the store is run by a team of booksellers with Bradshaw at the helm. “We are prety busy on Saturdays,” he tells me.


“Monday and Tuesday are prety quiet these days, but Sunday is usually the second busiest day of the week, though we are only open four hours that day.” As well as customers who come in to browse and get recommendations from the team, the shop also receives orders placed by those who want to support a small indie but do not necessarily want to browse its in-store stock. The bookshop is not located on the highstreet, so events are key to get customers into the shop; the booksellers hold 100 or so a year. In the past weeks, these have included a talk on the history of lesbian fashion, a conversation between human rights activist and politician Shami Chakrabarti and biographer Rachel Holmes, a launch of poetry pamphlets and a discussion with Jonathan Coe and Graham Caveney, who is the author of the recently published The Body in the Library (Peninsula Press) and used to work at Five Leaves. “This reflects only some of our interests in the shop,” Bradshaw explains. “We also had a talk on ospreys!” Most of the events are held in the store but some of the bigger ones have to be hosted at other venues due to size constraints. “We manage a lot from our 450-500 square feet, but we might, just might, be moving in a couple of years to much bigger premises, on a main street, in association with another organisation,” Bradshaw says. This is still in the early stages and might not come to fruition, but the bookshop owner tells me that staff are already arguing about the tpes of carpets and lighting they will have in the potential new shop. “The line we are thinking of taking is ‘like Five Leaves, but more so’,” he says. “I guess we’ll know what that means if it happens!”


Events drive sales for the bookshop and the owner says that nine out of its 10 bestsellers are “books where something happened”, whether that is an in-store conversation between authors, a stall for a festival or a book group. Non-fiction is popular among the shop’s customers, as is


ROSS BRADSHAW


©Fabrice Gagos


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