amnesty books:Layout 1
19/12/12
17:58
Page 1
CITYculture
PICTURE: Peter Michell
A RUNAWAY BESTSELLER The Amnesty bookshop in Gloucester Road is a charity shop like no other. Peter Cullimore, a volunteer, reports on the success story which has made it one of the best second-hand bookshops in the whole country
H
ordes of us regularly cram into the Books for Amnesty shop on Gloucester Road – an Aladdin’s cave of literary treasures, right at the heart of Bristol’s famous independent shopping street, on a regular basis. A visit is de rigueur while out buying fabulous meat, fish, bread, fruit and veg available from neighbouring retailers. There are plenty of other charity shops on Gloucester Road, but Books for Amnesty really stands out. With its distinctive black and white striped awning and higgledy-piggledy array of 20p bargains outside, the bookshop is reminiscent of that wonderful Channel 4 comedy Black Books. It looks a bit shambolic and you imagine finding a clueless Bill Bailey on the till or a drunken Dylan Moran in charge, sweeping customers out the door with a broom. As we all know appearances can be very deceptive. Books for Amnesty is quirky, yes, but also friendly, welcoming and phenomenally successful. Now celebrating its 15th anniversary, the shop has raised well over a million pounds for Amnesty International since it first opened in 1997, with sales averaging nearly £100,000 a year. The Bristol shop makes far more money than any of Amnesty’s six others across the country – in London, Brighton, Cambridge, Malvern, Newcastle and York. In an average week it sells 1,500 second-hand books – including many for children – plus CDs, vinyl, sheet music and an assortment of other products. Not bad for a bookshop run entirely by volunteers. There are about 100 of us in total, mostly working one morning or afternoon a week. We all take turns sorting, pricing and shelving the books and serving customers. Charity bookshops tend to sell mainly fiction but ours also has thousands of non-fiction books in scores of categories – an A to Z of everything from Academic Medicine to Zen Buddhism via History, Parenting and Sport. It’s the sheer variety that pulls in so many bookworms. I find Ben Curnow and a group of fellow students from the Bristol University Vet School rummaging through the Pets section for course textbooks. Ben says: “We can’t afford to buy them new and here it’s so much cheaper. Some books we need on our Veterinary Science course cost anything up to £70, whereas at Amnesty we might pick them up for just a couple of pounds.”
38 The Bristol Magazine
|
January 2013
James Monks, a retired clergyman, has been visiting the shop at least once a week ever since it first opened and has bought hundreds of books over the years. He says: “I look for ones on theology and the meaning of life. It’s always worth a visit - you never know what you might find.” Some of my fellow volunteers juggle shifts at Books for Amnesty with a full-time job, while others are retired or work part-time. Gerard Boyce, who retired last summer as Head of English at Colston’s School after teaching there for 30 years, has been a customer, donor and volunteer from the shop’s earliest days. He says: “I can never walk past without going in. It just draws you in. Amnesty is such a friendly bookshop and as someone who has taught English literature all my life it’s the most natural thing in the world for me to help out here.”
many people would say the Amnesty shop is ❝ still doing well simply because it has one of the best selections of second-hand books in the whole UK
❞
Any charity shop is only as good as the donations it receives, and at Books for Amnesty these come by the armful, bagful, boxful, carful and even houseful. Long-serving volunteer Andrew Campbell, the shop’s expert on the rare and valuable, was recently offered a collection of 3,000 books by an elderly woman in Wells. “She was going into a nursing home,” he says, “and as an Amnesty supporter wanted us to have her entire library. We had to hire extra storage space in Cheltenham Road to accommodate them.” It may seem incredible but Books for Amnesty has no paid manager, no chairman or committee and, apparently, no-one in overall charge. To cap it all, only one of the volunteers has any previous experience in the book trade. A recipe for anarchy and chaos? Anywhere else perhaps yes, but here somehow it all works brilliantly. Half a dozen dedicated and competent professionals in other fields – including two ex-bankers, a retired clinical psychologist, a teacher and a former job centre manager