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A podcast about the art and science of making books. Arthur Attwell speaks to book-making leaders about design, production, marketing, distribution, and technology. These are conversations for book lovers and publishing decision makers, whether you’re crafting books at a big company or a boutique publisher.
Hello, and welcome to How Books Are Made, a podcast about the art and science of making books. I'm Arthur Attwell.
Arthur Attwell:There is no place more universally loved than a good bookstore. They are truly special places. For their owners though, they are surprisingly hard to get right. I used to work in a bookshop, and I loved it. Even after I became an editor at a big publishing company, I kept working nights at the bookshop. Because the longer I worked there, the more there was to enjoy. There were book launches, there were money and marketing decisions to learn about, and, of course, there was an endless supply of beautiful books we could borrow. And compared to my other student jobs, book-buying customers are the best. Once I even got to meet Nelson Mandela, when he came in to buy a Mother's Day gift.
Arthur Attwell:Of course, the best bookshops are much more than books on shelves and a coffee bar. Behind the tranquility, its tiny team is buzzing for twelve hours a day, liaising with publishers, distributors, authors, literacy projects, landlords, even local government, trying to build a community of people who will buy books and help others to buy books. No one exemplifies this energy and broad mindedness better than Griffin Shea. Born in Louisiana, USA, and once a journalist with AFP, Griffin now runs Bridge Books in Johannesburg, South Africa, and the incredible African Book Trust, a non-profit that gives African books to libraries and schools across South Africa. I know you'll enjoy meeting Griffin as much as I did.
Arthur Attwell:Griffin, I'm so pleased to get to chat to you today. Thanks so much for joining me on the podcast.
Speaker 3:Yeah, thanks so much for the invitation. This is fun.
Arthur Attwell:Before we get into bookselling, I must tell you that you have already achieved one of my personal life goals. You've had Mark Hamill, Luke Skywalker himself, engage with your writing online. How did you pull that off?
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's sort of a shocker for me too. One of my freelance gigs, I used to do a lot of travel writing for CNN, and an assignment they gave me was to do places in Star Wars that you can visit in real life. So I had done a whole thing about Tunisia that I had pulled from, like, actual Star Wars official, you know, documentation. And then Mark Hamill chimes in on Twitter once the story goes up like, 'actually, that's not the way it happened, we were actually here for this scene at this other spot.' And he did so with absolute kindness and fun-lovingness and totally class act, you know? But there's nothing like waking up in the morning and looking at your notifications and being like, 'oh, is that a fake account? Oh my God, that's a real account.'
Arthur Attwell:That's fantastic. Yeah, in all seriousness, I was preparing for our conversation, and I got to read many of the stories that you have written as a journalist before you opened a bookstore. And it struck me that you are one of those special people who arrive in a new country and you get stuck in more than the locals do. You know more about the place than many of us. Certainly, you understand more about Johannesburg, beauty and ugliness, than most South Africans I know, including myself. Do you think you're just a naturally curious person?
Speaker 3:Maybe to some degree, but I also think when you're a foreigner, you get a certain amount of freedom that you don't have when you're from the place because there's no baggage for any of the locations, you know. So I don't have anything in the back of my mind nagging me, like, 'oh, don't go to the market in Yeoville because it's dangerous' or 'it's dirty' or it's whatever. It's sort of like, 'oh, that's where they sell lots of food from the rest of Africa, let's go check it out.' And then you just get there and experience on its own terms because I don't have any of that kind of background noise in my head.
Speaker 3:And I also think, you know, when you come into things with a journalism background, you are just kind of used to, like, seeing what's there. But it was an education anyway, when I left my full time journalism job I had been to downtown Joburg quite a lot, but I was always, like, on a mission. You know, I was doing something. I was never just like having a stroll through the CBD.
Speaker 3:And I thought I knew the city like relatively well, but then I realized I didn't because when I went, I was going to somewhere and then I was kind of running off to file, I was having an interview and then there was another appointment. And when you kind of slow down and look at things in a less rushed way, then you start realizing there's so much going on that you don't have time to pay attention to, you know, and especially if you're driving. You're just busy watching for the buses and the taxis and the pedestrians and looking at the robots and, you know, like, dodging the potholes.
Speaker 3:So you don't have time to kind of look and be like, 'oh, what's going on in that shop?' And, 'oh, is that a bookstore?' And just all the different things that you explore when you're on foot and not in a rush and have time to kind of just be like a tourist, be an explorer in a place where you live.
Arthur Attwell:Yeah, absolutely. There's a kind of fearless curiosity behind Bridge Books and everything you've done there, when I write about it, when I hear people talk about it and we'll dig into that a little bit in a moment. Before we talk about Bridge specifically, I realized that the person listening to us now might not have a good understanding of the economics of bookselling, and so we should cover some of the absolute basics of what bookselling is about. And I thought we could just start with how do booksellers get new books from publishers and set the prices?
Speaker 3:Yes. I mean, this I had to learn kind of by falling on my face a few times because I didn't come into this with any kind of, like, retail background. You know like, I did not know, but I think it's often missing from the discussion around reading and publishing in South Africa, but also anywhere in the world is distribution. Like, how do the books get from point A to point B?
Speaker 3:I assumed when I started that I would call up a publisher and be like, 'hey, I would love to have, like, five copies of this and two copies of that', and they would drop them off. And it kind of works that way, but in reality, the publishers don't have them themselves. You know, they're contracting, usually contracting another company that owns a warehouse and organizes deliveries and manages the accounts and does the logistics. So if I decided that I wanted ten copies of Jackie Phamotse's new book from Pan Macmillan, I need to know that Pan Macmillan's books are housed at a company called Booksite in Cape Town and that I need an account with Booksite. I need to negotiate terms.
Speaker 3:And at the beginning, it's very much like buying a used car or a mattress where you're kind of negotiating the discounts with each publisher to know, okay, they are offering a recommended retail price and maybe, and I'm just pulling numbers out of the air, I don't actually remember everyone's book price offhand, but so say Jackie's book is, they recommend that it retails at R300 and maybe the publishers wanted to give us a 50% discount, which would be extremely generous for small booksellers. Large companies tend to get that kind of discount. So then we're buying it at R150.
Speaker 3:And if we buy enough at one time, they'll cover the shipping costs. So it's really, you know, we're paying 1.50 and then they recommend we sell it at 300, but we could sell it for 200 if we want to, or 160, or we could give it away or, you know, once we've got it, it's ours. And that creates some interesting problems because, for the larger companies, they can integrate all of that into one operation. So for example, Media24 can own a distribution company and several publishing houses and Takealot and sell all of those things wholesale and retail and control quite a lot of that process. So one of the challenging things has been to realize that, oh, that's why books can be so cheap from some publishers on a platform like Takealot because they can sell to the public basically at a wholesale price, which makes it very hard for anyone else to sell and have a margin.
Speaker 3:And when you're building into that, what's also really interesting is if you are not pretty well-funded where you can buy all these books in cash to start up a bookstore and let's say you need a R100 000 to have a reasonable selection just to start with, right? If you don't have that money on hand, you need some kind of credit terms. Actually, when I started, they were really challenging to get, you know, so a lot of the distributors wouldn't give me credit. And it's not that I'm like, 'Griffin Shea is so amazing, I deserve a lot of credit', but I was like, I'm also going into this situation where I own my house. Like, I own my car. I have a retirement fund. I'm leaving a well-paid job with a multinational company. You know, I've got like, I have some kind of financial wherewithal. They wouldn't give me credit for twelve months until Bridge as a company had a twelve month trading record, which means it's very, very expensive to start up.
Speaker 3:And that's something that I found was very particular to books because when we opened a little coffee bar in the shop, I could basically just ring them up and be like, 'yeah, I'd like some coffee and I would like some milk and I maybe want some bottles of water.' And they're like, 'okay, here's some credit. We'll deliver it for you the next day, and you pay us at the end of the month.'
Arthur Attwell:Amazing.
Speaker 3:And with books, it was not that dynamic at all. It makes you realize, okay, so I'm coming into it from a really privileged background of financial stability and previous work experience. I'm in the country legally, I've got permanent residence in South Africa. I can bank, I can access financial services. If you were someone who was not coming into it from that level of privilege in your financial life and in your legal immigration life, it would be almost impossible to start and have access to formal publishing and mainstream publishing.
Arthur Attwell:Right.
Speaker 3:And I think the other challenge for authors is that there's really only one large distributor in the country. They don't need to work with small vendors. They can pay their bills working with large bookstores and large publishers. And so if you're a startup publisher, maybe you're only going to publish five titles this year or one title this year and maybe you will only ever do that one title. It's much harder to get your books around.
Speaker 3:So we have kind of stepped into that space in a way that for me has been helpful in our work. I do have a feeling that if I had a larger chunk of change to invest, like that distribution space is ripe for innovation, but there's definitely a better way to go about distributing books. And I always hate it when people compare South Africa to the way things are done overseas, but I do find it in that space and in just the management of data about books and the way information flows on a very practical level, like what are the stock levels? Where do you get the metadata? How do you download a book cover? You know, the things you need to start an online operation, it's not that readily available. The system is not really set up to help small players or to welcome small players just because in the past they haven't had to, and so the systems don't exist. Whereas I do think in a larger market with more competition, there's a lot of incentive to try to welcome in new bookstores, and think about different ways of doing business to make the data more readily available.
Speaker 3:And it's so wonky and nerdy, right, like the metadata issue. Like, it's something I never thought about ten years ago. But actually, it's a huge deal. Like, how do you know how many books are available and in what format and how much does it weigh and what's it gonna cost to ship it? And it's really, really important, and it's not easy to get.
Arthur Attwell:It's really, really important. And in fact, in an episode of the podcast, I speak to Emma Barnes, who runs a metadata service in the UK, and we talk a little bit about just how incredibly important that is, and how many publishers, especially in South Africa, are still just running on spreadsheets that they're emailing to each other. And that just makes it very difficult to create this kind of networked information flow that makes it possible to improve how books are distributed and sold.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it makes it very expensive to develop a system because if you have to use all those spreadsheets and reconcile them, and then you're formatting and reformatting them individually so that they can have one kind of consistent way of referring to them. And it also creates a problem I find for multilingualism because the way people tend to get around it is by just not providing the metadata and even the very basic level like the description of the book, if it was written in IsiZulu, to have a description of the book available in IsiZulu is not always available. Like sometimes we're sitting there writing it ourselves. And it's like, okay, so I accept that the book was translated say, from English, but if you want someone who is a reader of IsiZulu to buy it, why are you not telling them what it's about in the language you expect them to read it in? Like it's just very odd, yeah.
Arthur Attwell:It is amazing how the plumbing of publishing really does have to work for bookselling to work as well, and all these pieces have to work together.
Speaker 3:And that said, I mean, I don't know that overseas either, there's not a great plug and play system. You do need a certain level of technical expertise. You do need, you know, being able to integrate systems and be willing to dig into technical systems. But I think, fair enough. But when we download data on books locally, like we don't get the descriptions with it. We don't get cover images with it. We have to cobble all that together on our own. And probably, there is someone, ideally someone listening to this would be great, who has an amazing idea about how to do that better. I just haven't been able to figure it out.
Arthur Attwell:Challenge accepted.
Speaker 3:Yeah, thank you.
Arthur Attwell:And, of course, we've be talking about new books for the most part. How is selling second-hand books different? Because you're one of those rare booksellers that sells both, right? New and second-hand books?
Speaker 3:Yeah, absolutely. And partly that's because we do focus on African books and a lot of times they go very quickly into the second-hand market because the print runs are small because, you know, all the reasons that we know. There's often not a financial reason to do a large reprint. So if you want a copy of a book even from five or six years ago, sometimes second-hand is the only place you're going to find it.
Speaker 3:I find the second-hand market is a little bit of a weird one in a different way because on the one hand, you have people who are like, 'my granny is moving to the retirement village, we've got to downsize the house, here is her collection of 1000 books that we're actually happy if you will just take them away.' They don't even want any money for it. Sometimes it's people who have a very, I guess, optimistic sense of what their second-hand books are worth.
Speaker 3:So there might be people who think that everything is collectible and don't realize that actually the reason Danielle Steel novels are cheap is because millions of them are printed. So they're actually not worth anything on the second-hand market. They might be worth R20 really.
Arthur Attwell:Which is less than the work it takes just to put them on the shelf.
Speaker 3:No, exactly. And then you have this other interesting problem with African books in particular, where they often don't go into the second-hand market. So it's really, really challenging to find them, particularly if it's written in local languages.
Arthur Attwell:Interesting.
Speaker 3:So I was actually down at Collectors Treasury this week, you know, the giant multistorey second-hand bookstore in downtown Joburg that has, I mean, it is a treasure hunt. I can tell you that I get claustrophobic because it's like floor to ceiling books, you know, just stacked everywhere. And there is a logic to it, but I need deep breaths. But I was looking for the original Thomas Mofolo version of Chaka in Sesotho. They claim to have two million books and you can believe it. It's like, it's a lot.
Speaker 3:But they're like, 'we get almost nothing in local languages because people don't put it into the second-hand market.' That becomes like a real challenge even to find, just to find copies at all. But I also think there's something really interesting about, you know, we do a lot of hand-wringing about reading culture, right, that like, there isn't one or people don't read enough. But then it makes you realize, like actually books, particularly in local languages, are really highly valued to the point where people don't let them go. They stay within homes and families and communities and circle within trusted networks.
Speaker 3:But, you know, I would think nothing of dropping off my summer reading at a second-hand shop or charity box. But if it's written in local languages, no one does that. It's very, very hard to find.
Arthur Attwell:I often like to say that we want books to be so abundant that they feel disposable. As I say that, I can feel myself and others kind of cringing a little at the thought of using the word 'disposable' to apply to a book, but I think that I'm, in a sense, trying to be a little provocative because when we think about it in the way that you're saying now, those of us who have a lot of books are comfortable parting with many of them because we can always get more.
Speaker 3:Exactly.
Arthur Attwell:That feeling of abundance is what we could be aiming for as an industry.
Speaker 3:And I think with the second-hand books, you also find there is this network of second-hand book suppliers that's grown up organically. So we have door to door salesmen in the CBD who will come and be like, you know, they know what I want now, they know I'm not looking for Danielle Steel. They know, oh, if they've got a copy of Biko, that's definitely to take down to Bridge. If you can find some Bessie Head, you've hit the jackpot.
Speaker 3:They kind of go around to all of the places where people do drop off their summer reading and where people are doing charity sales. So it's, you know, the Wits charity shop, the SPCA even. It's any kind of church sale where you buy books for R5 or R10, and then they're reselling them at R20 or R30 and then the next person who resells it at, could be quite a lot more than that. It could be R50 or even a few hundred rand depending on what it is. And that's part of what I was learning when I started walking around Joburg originally, kind of hunting for bookstores and looking for things, is that there's this entire second-hand economy happening totally off the radar.
Speaker 3:I think it actually really distorts our impression of what people read and what people spend on books because we only have data on new books. And generally, we have books sold at stores that have an electronic point of sale because you calculate all that data. If you can't generate an Excel sheet for someone to add it up, it's like it doesn't exist. So I suspect if we knew more about the second-hand book market, we would be really surprised at how big it is and how dynamic it is.
Arthur Attwell:That's fascinating. You mentioned earlier the fact that you're often competing on price with online booksellers who are often very integrated with bigger companies and so on. And that made me think about the qualities that a physical bookshop provides, the experience it gives me if I go into a physical bookshop that is actually quite completely different from the experience I'm getting when I'm looking for a book online because I'm not actually just going there to buy a book, there's some experience beyond the book buying itself. The space is special. And, of course, you at Bridge Books also host events, collaborate with other artists and organizations nearby.
Arthur Attwell:What is it about books that makes them such a compelling way to gather people in these special little places called bookstores?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean, it's a funny thing. I think a lot about like what works and what doesn't sometimes, but I think there is something about browsing. You know, like I think when you're coming in to a bookstore, like if I do order books online too, even though I have access to books in many ways, but usually, when I'm ordering online, I've got, oh, I want this very specific title. Often, it's not readily available and it's just much easier to order it online and have it arrive magically. And it tends to be very functional.
Speaker 3:It's very need-based. But I think when you go to a bookstore, there's the magic of browsing, kind of discovering something and in a way that algorithms don't do because usually, especially in an independent bookstore, it's being curated by somebody's personality, you're kind of the ease of the shop. And so, you know if you're coming to us, you're going to get, we're probably a little bit nerdier than average, a little bit more local books, also things that we just enjoy. You know, we don't do textbooks and things like that, you know, so, which maybe we should. Maybe we'd make more money if we were to do textbooks.
Speaker 3:But you kind of know your... it's kind of like engaging with another person. And ideally, the booksellers have come to work in a bookstore because they like to read too. So you're able to have a conversation with someone and maybe they haven't read the book, they've at least heard about it and they definitely have read something recently that they're usually pretty happy to talk about. And it's also this kind of weird dynamic of like gathering introverts, you know, because a lot of times readers and writers do it because they're not always necessarily comfortable being in a big group or speaking in front of a crowd or usually, there's some kind of self-selecting going on about who shows up there, but it's like a quiet space where people can gather and you kind of know what you're going to get in the sense of the experience. It's not like one day you're going to come in and we're having a disco.
Speaker 3:Even if there's an activity going on, it's going to be something bookish happening. Maybe there's a writing group and maybe we're doing a workshop and maybe there's a book launch, but it's going to be something connected. And I think it's kind of that joy of exploration. Maybe you're looking for something in particular, but you might find something else at the same time.
Arthur Attwell:There's a feeling when you're looking through a bookstore and you're finding things that speak to you and you're being a little surprised that something could be so perfect just sitting there waiting for you. That makes bookshops feel like a safe place to be because you're there and they're gonna say, the bookshop's gonna say to you, 'yeah, we've got something for you.'
Arthur Attwell:You mentioned that perhaps if you sold textbooks or other kinds of books, less nerdy ones, you would make more money. I imagine that you make a lot of trade offs between decisions that would make you more money and decisions that make you more proud of what Bridge Books is and stands for, and that probably also overlaps with your non-profit work as well. Tell me more about that, what are the decisions you make that make you proud and are rewarding, that don't necessarily make you much money?
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean, so there's a, I guess, kind of connected to the idea about what the bookstore experience is, especially in the CBD, it can be a quiet space and a safe place for people to come in. So we get a lot of kids, like in the afternoon, school kids who just need a place where they can sit and study and there's electricity and WiFi and a bathroom and like really, really we're not programming their lives, we're not offering them a lot of services, but it's just a space. And some of that spills out because one of the problems when I first started, I couldn't understand why there was so much garbage on the sidewalk.
Speaker 3:The garbage trucks come. It's not that they don't come. They would pass once a day. I was like, but why is there still so much? And then you realize, of course, there are reasons, right, it's more complicated than it looks like on the surface. So some of the non-profit work also started because I'm like, okay, well, we need to figure out how we're gonna get the garbage off the sidewalk. And a lot of the kids coming in and not really being clear on the difference between a bookstore and a library. You know, and the main city library, the big, beautiful Joburg City Library is two blocks from our store.
Arthur Attwell:Wow.
Speaker 3:I'm sure we have thousands of books, but the Joburg Library has one and a half million books and is this giant new classical thing from the 20s and looks like a temple kind of thing, you know. And so people were willing to borrow books, or maybe they've been to the library and the library, I think, actually does a lot of really good work despite the main building being closed and there's a whole conversation there, but they were looking for the books that we had and wanting to borrow books and not buy them. But if we're even willing to rent them for a lower price, we didn't have the money to pay for it but we're happy to rent it like a videotape in the old days.
Speaker 3:So then it was sort of like, okay, well, how do we support that need? How do we provide books for free to people? And it was just very simple, and we started a very small non-profit and it would give away books and we would give books to schools and libraries on a very, very small scale. It would be like a couple dozen at a time, not like massive amounts.
Arthur Attwell:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Whereas last year, I think we donated 10 000 books around the city, to different places around the country.
Arthur Attwell:Wow.
Speaker 3:And also trying to network the booksellers a little bit better because, you know, in downtown Joburg, we've got seventy-one booksellers of all kinds of different sizes over like three square kilometers. You know, it's very dense. And some of them are tiny, but some of them are enormous. It goes from somebody on the sidewalk with a stack of ten books to Collectors Treasury that I was talking about with two million books.
Speaker 3:So yeah, trying to build a little bit more of an identity for the neighbourhood because when people think of downtown Joburg, they tend to think 'gangster's paradise' to some degree, not to minimize the city's problems. There is trash on the sidewalk. There is crime. There is all that stuff.
Speaker 3:But I would say there are plenty of American cities where that's a problem too. It's not a uniquely Joburg thing, but to get people a little more sense of place. And so a lot of that work takes an extraordinary amount of time, doesn't pay very much at all when we can get it funded, you know, is how we get it to go. And a lot of that has been over the last two years, we've been doing the Social Employment Fund, which is part of the COVID relief operation with the President's Office, that's why we've been able to go up a lot the last two years. We've got about sixty-two people on staff once round three kicks up, I think. I haven't confirmed our numbers yet. But even though it's funded, it takes a lot of time to manage that is not billable. It's a bit of extra time.
Speaker 3:There's a lot of bodies to take care of, but that's the way that we, we made a map of the neighbourhood and marked out all seventy-one bookshops that we are printing and hosting on the side. On the district.co.za website, we've got the Google map version of it so people can click through and get descriptions and figure out where they're going to find the bookstores, how we can run reading programmes. You know, we do at a school in Mayfair, where there's a lot of kids working in the informal settlement nearby. It teaches a lot of them and they let us bring in books for their reading programme and do story time and things like that.
Speaker 3:And then we can kind of supplement what other people do. You know, like Massmart built these two outdoor libraries at community centers in Alex and Soweto, but they were kind of handed over to the community centres who don't have enough human resources, financial resources to take care of it. But that's something that we can plug into and be like, okay, well, we can fill these up. You know, like we can provide books in. We always struggle to provide enough kids' books and books in local languages for the reasons we were just discussing.
Speaker 3:Like, you don't get donated copies of them. They have to be bought. And it's, there's a price to cover that, no matter how cheap they are. You know, when we started, it was sort of a small bookshop and we were running a very, very small NGO on the side. And it's, the portions definitely flipped in the last four years where the NGO part takes a lot more time and energy and staff.
Speaker 3:And now we have two kind of small bookstores attached to it. And it's always a juggle because you need the money to pay the bills and pay the rent. And I think often, funders think that you don't have rent or something, that there is no cost, you have no overhead. Like all we do is reading programmes, but we don't have to keep the books anywhere or train the staff or...
Speaker 3:But it also brings a lot of joy and I think also gives us a way to connect with the neighbourhood in a different way. One of the things I've been trying really hard to figure out this year is how do we take another step in dealing with the other booksellers where we can overcome some of those distribution challenges to say, how can we take small businesses that, for a variety of reasons, can't access the formal economy? Maybe have trouble accessing banking services for any number of reasons, right? Who can't get credit with a distributor to receive new books, who can't join the book trade in that way, but who probably, I would suspect, have a market who could buy them and some of the booksellers you meet it looks like they're running a very, very small stand and then as you get to know them over the years it's like, wait, you own your house and you own your car and your kids are going to a nice school and you're sending them to varsity and you're totally doing middle class off of this very modest looking operation.
Speaker 3:There's more to your finances than meet the eye and yet you're still not able to access new books. Why is that? So I'm not quite sure what the answer is. Part of it is banking services and just seeing like, can they get a SnapScan, a Yoco, an Ikhokha, some kind of payments device where they could accept cards and thinking of some kind of way to aggregate orders and have a payment cycle where people know what they're going to get.
Arthur Attwell:Yeah, I think bookselling in particular has to rely on a lot of aggregation because you're dealing with a product that is quite fragile, that is quite heavy and expensive to ship around, and it's also coming from hundreds of different sources. Aggregation and streamlined data is really the only way you can make it work financially, either that or you're doing a lot of late night spreadsheet wrangling.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and I think the outreach. One of our customers worked for Colgate, like toothpaste, but her job was marketing in other African countries. So South Africa was not her turf, the rest of Africa was. You know, one day she came in, she's having a cup of coffee. We're chatting about books and I'm like, 'hey, you know, where have you been?' And she had just gotten back from Kinshasa and her entire job was to walk around the markets of Kinshasa and interview people about, well, like what kind of toothpaste is working for you? Is this tube too big? Is there a price point issue? Like, if we sold it to you in a smaller tube at this price, would you be able to sell more? Do people like minty? Do they want their teeth whitened? You know?
Speaker 3:Like, all of these things. And it just blew my mind that that was her job. And I was like, God. Like, if we walked around and asked booksellers, like, 'what are your hurdles? What are all your pain points?' You know, to use the lingo. And be like, 'well, if they were smaller format, would you be able to sell more?' Like, 'what price point is working for you? If we can get the price of a book down to R150, how many do you think you'd be able to sell like that? Does it need to be R40? Or do people really value it, and actually, they're willing to pay R300, but you don't have access to the book because you don't have a bank account.' You know, like where is the issue? And it just really made me think about it in a different, more practical way.
Speaker 3:And I think a lot of us come into books and publishing not from a, like, I don't have an MBA. I don't know how this works. We don't have that mindset. So we figure it out as we go. But probably, we have maybe a larger community of people who would be very sympathetic to what we're trying to do who actually do know how to do that. Like, there probably is a theory and a practice to it that could just be taught. You know?
Arthur Attwell:It strikes me that Bridge Books is an extreme example of something I think seems to be common to bookstores everywhere, which is that you can't get by just selling the books. You have to build a community. Do you think that is universal for bookstores, especially independent ones?
Speaker 3:Yeah, you know, and I take a lot of comfort, you know, we do these, one of our many side hustles is, you know, we do these walking tours downtown to show people the other bookshops. At the corner of Commissioner and Rissik is where the original CNA started, the Central News Agency's first shop. And when they started in the 1800s, it was a trestle table and a metal shack and a sandwich board.
Arthur Attwell:Wow.
Speaker 3:That's how they did until the 20s when they built a tower. One of these kind of art deco numbers that's kind of fallen into disrepair, has a Home Choice kind of furniture store in it now. But if you look up at the side of the building, it has the old advertisement from when it was CNA and it lists all the things that they did. So it's like booksellers, publishers, almanac specialist, fancy good dealers, which I'm like, what are fancy goods? And what were fancy goods in the 1920s? But they did copywriting, they did so many different things listed on that sign. I was like, oh, it's just not like a new problem. Right?
Speaker 3:It feels like a new problem because, you know, the Internet has changed the way we do things, and we all feel disgruntled about some of this stuff. And, you know, that's all valid, I think. But plenty of bookstores, you go in and you wonder, like, how much is your bar bringing in relative to your bookstore? And I don't know the answer. Is your coffee shop thriving and your bookstore is kind of also ran or is it the other way around?
Speaker 3:It's just, I'm really curious how those things work. But we had to do a lot of other things. And, you know, one of the reasons we started publishing was because of the, I mean, on a very, very small scale, but, you know, we started publishing because we couldn't get the books that our customers were looking for because they were old and in the public domain. Things like Marcus Garvey or Herbert Dhlomo that people wanted but were not in print. And because they were in the public domain, we were like, well, let's just make new ones, you know, it's a lot easier than trying to hunt down a second-hand copy that's gonna cost us R2000 because none of them exist, you know.
Arthur Attwell:Right.
Speaker 3:And also dealing with the challenges of publishing local languages, you know, where there's just not enough, like, you just need more. And if we're a little bit in control of that, it's a way where we can sell it and cover some of the printing cost and have copies to give away. And I think there's a virtuous cycle there. Like, I'm really hoping that it's gonna be.
Arthur Attwell:So much of this does seem to be feeding a virtuous cycle. It may even outlast our lifetimes in that you're growing readers and making it possible for people to find books to enjoy being readers and also helping put booksellers on the map, putting important African books back in circulation by doing the publishing work as well. A lot of this is seed planting that may take a very long time to bear fruit, but it's important and it has to be done.
Speaker 3:And it's also growing the skills that are needed because of the historical context and censorship and all the things. There's not a deep pool of people who are really capable translators, editors, particularly in languages that are less widely spoken. In IsiZulu you can put the word out and find somebody, but if you were trying to do it in Tshivenḓa or something, it gets a lot more challenging quickly.
Arthur Attwell:While there are people that, it's not an industry in the sense that there's not a lot of choice and it's not easy to think of someone.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And I mean, yeah, it does exist. And it's also been interesting that as we get to know the booksellers that are one of the book shops in the neighbourhood downtown is the oldest bookstore in Joburg. They started in 1920, third generation business. He carries a lot in local languages and I was chatting with him and he was kind of going into this reading culture conversation.
Speaker 3:I was like, 'oh God, I'm not in the mood for this hand-wringing', you know? And he's like, 'no, that's just like in Venḓa, we just don't sell as many books as we used to.' And I was like, 'really? Did you used to sell a lot of books in Venḓa? Because I personally don't, it's like one of our less popular languages', right? He was like, 'yeah, yeah, there used to be a lot of mine workers who would pass through town and they would be in the neighbourhood because they were getting on buses to go out to the mines and they would come and buy books from us to take with them. And we would have Venḓa authors who were working in the mines to pay their bills and they would come and sell us the books that they were writing and there was this whole reading culture happening in Venḓa.' And I'm like, 'I have never heard that. This is completely new information to me.'
Arthur Attwell:Fascinating. That's amazing.
Speaker 3:Also, it just raises all these questions like where did those books go? And I'm sure, like we were saying earlier, they're in homes in a place of honour over the mantle in the China cabinet somewhere, but just hard to figure out where all of that knowledge went and how do we rebuild it and make it again so there is a network of people. So you can go like, hey, here's the translator-skilled and a list of qualified people in all these different languages. I mean, that'll all take time. But yeah, I think it is seed planting. You're right.
Arthur Attwell:One of the things that you've been involved in, talking about growing and supporting the industry at large, is that you've chaired the judging panel of the Sunday Times Non-Fiction Award, which is perhaps South Africa's most prestigious non-fiction award. When you're doing that work, how much are you thinking like a bookseller, like a reader, like a journalist? Do those sides of you have different priorities as you're weighing up the book?
Speaker 3:Yeah, it is funny, I think, you know, they asked me to do it twice, which is, like, a great honour, but also, like, surrendering all of your spare time for, like, three months to read all of those books.
Arthur Attwell:It's huge.
Speaker 3:But I do think people coming at it from a more, sometimes from a more literary or academic background want to give a lot of time to each one and I go into it much more of a like, who are we going to hand this to to read and tell them what it's about, you know? And then part of the criteria for that particular award is the elegance of the writing, you know, it's in the criteria that it's meant to be an elegant book in addition to truthful and speaking truth to power and all those other very important things. But I think that part of it gets overlooked. Like, was it graceful? Like, do we, did we enjoy reading it?
Speaker 3:It might be beautifully reported, you know, I mean, very deep and, like, providing some lot of new knowledge, but would you actually hand it to someone and say, 'you've got to read this', you know, which is the bookseller's job, right, is to be like, 'this is the one you really want to take home with you and you'll enjoy it.' It's not homework because you have to read about whatever political issue. It's, you know, something that's going to bring you some kind of joy from reading it too, even if it's a horrible book in the sense of like, maybe it's about a murder, you know, which it was. There was one year there was a lot of murders, you know, on those of that list. But sometimes the telling of it is so, like, heartwarming too because of the way —
Arthur Attwell:Right.
Speaker 3:— the writer has gone about it. You know? You know, I think about, like, Andrew Harding. Andrew Harding did, These Are Not Gentle People where it's like you're getting to know everyone in the town. And the crime is horrific, but you leave it feeling like, oh, I've, like, really, like, learned this place and the language is really lovely and it's, you know, not just a crime procedural.
Arthur Attwell:As we wrap up and, thinking back on your friend walking through the market asking about toothpaste, what would you like to be selling more of at Bridge Books if there was more of it to sell?
Speaker 3:I have been thinking a lot about middle grade, you know, like, kind of the books that we graduate kids to when they're too old for a picture book, but they're not quite ready for like, my novel is more older kids. You know, I wrote this book, The Golden Rhino, and that's where you need to be more thirteen to get into, but there's that gap there where you need, like a Lemony Snicket, a Magic Tree House, you need something.
Speaker 3:When I started Bridge Books, we had a real problem getting picture books that had any children of colour in them at all and particularly that were in local languages. And that, it's been really gratifying to see, like, in eight years, huge change, I think. Like, truly huge, huge change. Fun books, you know, they, and it also used to be, like, they had to be about Nelson Mandela or they had to be about some, like, dreadfully serious, like, you know, something. And now it can just be about, like, going to get your hair done.
Speaker 3:But I think middle grade, in middle grade, that's really fun. Like, kids want mystery and to some degree, they want fart jokes and they want princesses and dinosaurs and dragons and monsters and, you know, just...
Arthur Attwell:The David Walliams of South Africa, I suppose.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Like something middle grade, ten short chapters, lightly illustrated and super fun. Things that kids ask their parents to buy as opposed to things that teachers make those children read.
Arthur Attwell:Absolutely. I love the idea of getting children to ask their parents to buy them things that are actually good for the kids as well.
Speaker 3:Yeah, exactly. Yeah, my theory on it has actually been like, but I think there's not enough research on it to work from, but to figure out like kind of African knights, you know, knights with a K. Kind of old, pre-colonial, you know, who were the warriors? Who were the adventurers, who were the explorers? Not just South Africa, but to think about like Mali and Ethiopia and all the old kingdoms and that would be fun and I think kids would be into that. You know, there's a way to give it kind of ninja treatment, but how to be local.
Arthur Attwell:Well, I hope it's not long before you're selling something, hand over fist, like that, hand over fist, at Bridge Books. It's been really, really interesting. Thanks so much, Griffin, for spending some time with me.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Thanks so much. I really had fun.
Arthur Attwell:This episode was edited by Helen le Roux and researched by Emma Sacco. How Books Are Made is supported by Electric Book Works, where we develop and design books for organizations around the world. You can find us online at electricbookworks.com.