Bookseller feature: Sam Barnes of Books & Ink, Winchcombe

"What really makes bookselling not a job but a vocation and a calling, is the joy of witnessing those moments of serendipitous discovery when customers fall in love with books right before your eyes ..."

Sam Barnes opened Books & Ink Bookshop in 2005 in Banbury, Oxfordshire, and has since re-located the shop to Winchcombe in the Gloucestershire Cotswolds. She was our very first independent bookseller guest during her Banbury days, contributing a review back in 2018; now we're pleased to welcome her back to tell us what makes her Winchcombe shop so special.

The older one becomes, the quicker time passes. I’m sure there’s a good literary quote about this but I don’t have one coming to mind. It seems unbelievable that it’s already more than six years since I moved the bookshop from Banbury to Winchcombe. With an energy I didn’t know I had, and with my incredibly supportive family mucking in with all the least glamorous jobs, together we renovated a run-down but majestic 18th -century building – former restaurant, with dilapidated bed-sit type rooms above – into the beautiful bookshop space I have now, with the added bonus of a two bed book and nature-themed short term holiday let above, our much-loved Book Nook (ideal for writing retreats, wink wink). We have finally found our forever home. 

Winchcombe is the reason why we moved the bookshop. It’s an unspoilt small town in the northwest of the Cotswolds. It’s charming; full of character and history, yet undiscovered enough to have a friendly, active local community, which is what we fell in love with. For visitors there’s a wealth of delights on the doorstep – all within a few miles you can find majestic Sudeley Castle, burial place of Henry VIII’s last wife, Hailes Abbey, Belas Knapp neolithic burial mound, the Gloucestershire and Warwickshire Steam Railway, with a train stop at Winchcombe one mile from the town centre, Cleeve Hill which is the second highest hill of the Cotswolds, outstanding for walks and views, our historic St. Peter’s Church, complete with super grotesques, one of which is known as the “Mad Hatter”. If all that isn’t enough, Winchcombe is lauded as “The Walking Capital of the Cotswolds” due to the array of foothpaths crossing the town and the beautiful countryside around. 

Today I sit in this inviting, tranquil space – with ancient beams and honey-coloured flagstone floor which has seen foot traffic for more than 250 years and numerous trades come and go from this building. It’s a Farmers Market Saturday (which I try to open for but I can’t always make it in on Saturdays) so there’s hustle and bustle outside. I get a few passing friendly waves from locals who haven’t time to call in today and then the doorbell jingles and my first visitors of the day arrive. They are on holiday and immediately exclaim about how beautiful the shop is and how it’s bigger on the inside. Aside: I hear this comment so often maybe I should re-name the shop Tardis Books! 

Thus starts a sunny Cotswolds shop day with the perfect mix of local customers and tourists from around the globe – my favourite kind of day. I especially enjoy occasionally trying out a word or two of German which I have been trying to learn now for a few years. My least favourite bookshop days are rainy days. In Banbury I enjoyed a bookshop rainy day as I didn’t have display tables and the shop was much bigger. Nowadays I have books out on display and they’re a prime target to be dripped on (!!) so I spend rainy days in a state of anxious high alert as books and water are not a happy mix. 

The bookshop has gone through many changes over its 20 years, starting out as second hand books and new stationery (hence the name) and has now settled into a focus on antiquarian and illustrated books, themed vintage books from Penguin and Puffin paperbacks, to old Everyman editions, Ladybird and Observer’s books, collectable children’s books from times gone by – which I love hearing people reminisce about as they wander – plus other themed displays as they come my way. I also keep a large selection of more modern second hand paperback literature, crime fiction and children’s novels, a well-stocked local history section, plus a small array of hand-picked new books. 

Vintage children's books

We have an extra space which we have been slowly renovating for the past few years and this will be opened later this year as a dedicated room for history, military history and related subjects like politics. I’m excited to get this space open soon as I have some outstanding stock sitting in storage, waiting to come and fill the shelves. When you have your own bookshop it can be enormous fun to let your personality spill out onto the shop floor from time to time!! ... Since re-locating, the bookshop has evolved into stocking Willie’s Cacao dark chocolate. Willie is in the process of moving his artisan chocolate factory to nearby Herefordshire so there will be a local connection but his dark chocolates also happen to be my favourite vegan-friendly range and I like having a supply close at hand! 

Vintage teddy bears have also descended on the shop and have been a huge hit with customers of all ages. I adore seeking them out, giving them a “Teddy Bear Spa Day” and then finding them new forever homes. Prints, original art, wood engravings, antique etchings, maps and other printed ephemera have also found a space in the shop and I’m currently thrilled to have a number of original paintings made for Ladybird Books by the artist Roger Hall. Outreach events, like book fairs, have had to take a step back while we navigate our way around personal challenges that came our way with the outbreak of the Covid pandemic; so too my website stock. But we are instead thoroughly enjoying running our Book Nook apartment and meeting all our lovely bookish guests from all walks of life. 

Vintage Ladybirds

We don’t yet live in Winchcombe but when we move to the town I’m looking forward to being able to offer longer opening hours, including evening openings, so more book lovers can discover the shop. Writing this piece has been an interesting reflection for me on 20 years as a bookseller and all that that encompasses – curator, book guardian, researcher, matchmaker, reviewer, rescuer, re-homer, marketer, accountant, building renovator, designer, and hostess – but above all, what has really makes bookselling be not a job but a vocation and a calling, is the joy of witnessing those moments of serendipitous discovery when customers fall in love with books right before your eyes. This is what I hope to be doing for at least another 20 years to come.

For our first independent bookseller feature in April 2018, when Sam was in her Banbury shop, she recommended In This Grave Hour by Jacqueline Winspear

Bookshop Feature: PANDA'S BOOKS AND RECORDS in Levenshulme, South Manchester, by Paul Magrs

 

"Let’s do it. Shall we do it? Shall we save the bookshop on our high street?"

Paul Magrs is a novelist. His partner Jeremy Hoad is a Community activist, DJ, and Organiser of Levenshulme Pride. They'll celebrate their thirtieth anniversary as a couple in summer 2026. Together they opened Panda's Books and Records in November 2025.

It was something we always thought we’d like to do, at some point in our lives.

When the chance came along – Halloween 2025 – to take possession of our own bookshop it was like: if not now, when are we actually going to do it? We’re both in our late fifties. Our crazy freelance lives give us the time to do something as mad as this. Let’s do it. Shall we do it?

Shall we save the bookshop on our high street?

Jeremy and I have lived in Levenshulme, South Manchester, for twenty-one years. It’s a right mix-up of cultures and always has been. It’s wonderful here: lots goes on and there’s always a drama. Sometimes it feels like the whole world in microcosm: Middlemarch, plonked on the A6 between Manchester and Stockport. And the bookshop is right in the middle of that thoroughfare.

Ian and Suzy started up the shop six years ago as Bopcap Books, building a loyal clientele and a sense of pride in all of us, that our run-down bit of town had its own bookshop. Used and new, with lovely art prints and classic novels, wonderful picture books and funny greetings cards. When they found that for a variety of reasons they had to give up the lease to concentrate on their newer shop – the Quiet Cat, in Macclesfield – we saw their bittersweet message on the local Facebook group. ‘Does anyone want to buy a bookshop?’ How they’d had a lovely time being our bookshop but now they had to go. Was anyone in a position to take it over?

We took maybe half a morning, right at the end of October, to decide that it was exactly what we wanted to do. Jeremy and I jumped in with both feet.

I turned 56 mid-November and the very next day I began a new career.

‘Panda’s Books and Records’ opened on November the thirteenth.

 
Now I sit at my front desk, feet chilly on the concrete floor, with the doors of the old police station in which we’re based open to the street. Our shop is part of a complex of antique outlets at the southern end of Stockport Road. We have disco and New Wave music playing all day long. People dance in our shop! They actually dance and bop about, singing, as they browse! They just do it without even realising it. Early on in the lead-up to last Christmas I realised how much I disliked the hushed calm of many bookshops – with their mimsy plinky-plonk music playing – and their library-like atmosphere, or that horrible feeling of being a bit like school. I prefer a bit of noise in a bookshop. Besides the music there’s a great deal of chatter and laughter here. Old friends coming in, local faces, brand new customers. Everyone gets introduced and there’s a lot of kerfuffle almost every day. People telling us how glad they are that the bookshop is still here. We saved the bookshop!

A toddler starts jumping up and down with excitement because she realises that there are Pandas in every spare corner of the two rooms of our shop. Not just the giant one sitting on a wooden chair when you first come in, or the ‘real’ original Panda sitting sentinel on the windowsill. There are plush Pandas perched everywhere, more and more as you look. The toddler can’t keep herself from dancing with glee.

We sell vinyl albums as well, and this is something else that makes it less stuffy than other bookshops, perhaps. There’s a lot of talk about bands and LPs. Young guys buying albums that came out before they were born. Lots of nostalgia: people collecting up treasures they once had, then lost and wish for again. The importance of physical media is something that’s come to the fore in these uncertain times, as if we can only ever be really sure of the records we play for ourselves; the books we hold in our hands.

 One regular customer who we inherited from Bopcap books – a lady who is 99 and bright as a button – sits by my desk and calls out topics she’d like to read about this month: Postage stamps! India! Famous quotations! Then she tells me about her Aunt Linda reading ‘The Little Sea Maid’ aloud ninety-odd years ago and how the sound of that voice has never left her. And just yesterday there was the eight year old boy who came in with his family but looked at the children’s books option-blinded, and couldn’t find anything he might want to read. Then I said, ‘Have you heard of the Hardy Boys? I read them all at your age. They’re exciting and what’s brilliant is, you can read them in any order you like.’ I set out a whole load of the 1970s Armada paperbacks – the ones with wonderfully painted covers. He chose the spookiest one, with an old dark castle on the cover.

I sit in our shop beside the Christmas tree we got from a local give-away group – its lights twinkle long past Christmas and its branches are now almost completely crowded with scarlet gift tags, on which we’ve asked people to write down their favourite book recommendations. Jeremy is on his feet all day while I serve customers and try to get back to my current read. He’s a dervish of bookcase reorganisation: everything has moved and changed its place in the past two months. Sometimes more than two or three times. He’s always looking for the perfect placement for each genre so that, as people walk around the shop, it tells its own story in exactly the right way. Each genre has been broken down into sub-groups and each shelf is labelled. People like our labels – Science Fiction and Fantasy became ‘Monsters and Planets’, History is now ‘Queens and Tyrants.’ I think we’ve taken the feel of the previous bookshop and evolved it gently to suit our own tastes in music and books and art: more nostalgia, more pulp, more kitsch and fantasy.

 

Every day we get people coming in with bags of books for sale or donation. Sometimes wonderful dragon hoards of gold. At times quite startling things that we might or might not take. Every day I bring in boxes of my own books from our over-stuffed house. It is as if I always knew this time would come. I have no one to actually pass my creaking, towering stacks onto and yet it seems as if I was always planning one day to put all this surplus stuff into a bookshop.

It’s a treasure trove, an exhibition, a museum, a superstore, a starship fuelled by writing and pictures and printed pages: capable of taking you anywhere in the galaxy. And I get to sit at the helm of this ship for four days of the week.

And I’ve remembered something I kind of forgot when I stayed at home, being a freelance writer every day. I really like being in the middle of the community, talking with people about life and books in the afternoon. It reminds me of my first job, at UEA, when I was first teaching Creative Writing there, in the late 90s. I used to sit in my office, drinking coffee and talking as if books and essays and stories were the most important things in the world. So it’s good to be somewhere that reminds you that they are.

There’s something very civilising in these tricky times, about being in a place devoted to passing on messages down the ages. That’s all books and pictures and stories really are: messages that say, ‘Hey, hello, how are you all doing in your own era? We’ve been having a right old time of it here. You won’t believe what’s going on here, back in time. It’s all kicking off! Listen to this…!’

It's being at the heart of an endless conversation. A convergence of so many dimensions. And that’s where I want to sit for slightly more than half of every week.

Independent Bookseller Feature no 14: Claire Grint of COGITO BOOKS, Hexham, chooses EXPECTATION by Anna Hope

"Beautifully realised characters, elegant, emotionally direct prose and clever fluid structure." 

"Cogito Books has been in my family since we first opened our doors in 2001. I became much more involved with the shop after graduating, so it was a natural transition for me to take over the business when my Dad retired. With a small but dedicated team of three experienced booksellers, we put the customer at the centre of everything we do – and we love nothing better than sharing recommendations and talking about books.

A family business from the outset, Cogito Books was established by my Dad back in 2001. I joined him in 2005, then  took over when he retired in July 2012. I love books and people, so running a bookshop has always been a perfect combination for me. The relationships we build with customers are absolutely central to what we do – and nothing beats the feeling of helping someone to find the perfect book and hearing that they enjoyed it.

What makes our bookshop unique? The relationships we build with customers are absolutely central to what we do – from discovering their reading tastes to knowing the details of their lives. We’re lucky to be at the centre of a thriving community, running three monthly book groups in addition to author events and weekly storytelling sessions for children. Customers often comment on the sheer range and breadth of books we stock; being independent, we’re lucky to be able to get behind books we love and to provide a curated, personalised experience." Claire Grint

See more on our website.

This novel is utterly luminous; the lives of friends Cate, Hannah and Lissa leaping straight out from the page and resonating in the very deepest sense, as we’re invited to recognise and celebrate the experiences which mould us as human beings. The novel pivots around the year 2010, where we find Cate struggling to cope with new motherhood and her in-laws, Hannah undergoing gruelling IVF treatment and Lissa beginning to think that she’s running out of time to achieve success as an actress. The past is then woven into the present, with subsequent sections diving back through the years to reveal more about the roots of the women’s friendship; the experiences which created it and those which are beginning to fracture it on both subtle and dramatic lines. 

The issues in the novel are ones we can all recognise; examining friendship, feminism and family in our complicated century. The beautifully realised characters, elegant, emotionally direct prose and clever fluid structure create a portrait of lives both full and vivid yet tinged with the melancholy of regret. The novel tells of chances not taken, of mistakes made; of the gap between expectation and our often painful, compromised yet ultimately precious reality.

Expectation is published by Transworld.

Personal book recommendation

Team 20th birthday celebration: Claire Grint, Hilary McCallum and Jenny Tattersall