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At Mr B’s in Bath they have a lovely gift experience called a Book Spa. You sit with one of the sellers and chat about books you’ve enjoyed in the past, books/genres you’d be interested to try but don’t know where to start etc then they go around the shop finding a set of books they think you might like and you get to choose a number of them. You also get tea and cake!

I don’t know if that’s viable for your shop but you could always try book spa evenings where it’s more of a communal thing? Like everyone pays for a ticket and has discussions with others about books etc and they get to take one book home with them up to the value of x.

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Oh and there was that one time when I went in Blackwell’s in Oxford and said, I came in here a year ago when I was skint and wanted to buy a book but didn’t. It was on this table here, it had a green cover and it was written in quasi-Old-English. One of the staff was able to recognize the book from my description and provide me with a copy of WAKE by Paul Kingsnorth.

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I like that thing that they have in Waterstones where the staff write a little card recommending books they liked.

You could also try little cards that say “if you liked Golden Boy by Abigail Tarttelin, you’ll love Felix Ever After by Kacen Callender”, or “if you loved the movie Coco, you’ll love Ghost Squad by Claribel Ortiz”, or “if you love Payback’s a Witch” by Lana Harper, you’ll love Witch Please by Ann Aguirre” or “if you loved Black Water Sister by Zen Cho, you’ll love Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo”.

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I love seeing what booksellers are enjoying. Nothing is more intriguing than a table with the team's best picks. Or better yet, some obscure theme that groups a random selection and pulls you away from the alluring bestseller display. I think I recently went into a bookshop and saw a table of books that all came under the theme: 'Women walking places'.

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Mar 19, 2023·edited Mar 19, 2023

I was thinking of the concept of social prescribing but applying that to books, since literature is such a balm for the soul. For example, someone might walk into the shop and be in need of a book to read to feel awed by the beauty of nature again or a book to read to channel anger productively or maybe even just a book to read to make them giggle - maybe there could be collections of books based around feelings or concepts like that. The possibilities are endless :)

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Thank you for this. I really enjoyed reading this. And I for one am currently looking for books that may have been forgotten about. Sounds daft but I don’t always want to read the same as everyone else! Have recently enjoyed a couple of earlier Hilary Mantels and am looking at Anita Brookner’s back catalogue. Came through an airport today advertising BookTok (hope I’ve got that right!) and it made me realise how much of a part social media plays in what people read now...

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It’s been 15 years since I read My War Gone By… Loved it. Might be time to read it again.

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