We can’t believe we have been open a year!!

On December 1st 2020 after several months of trying to raise a loan, negotiating with landlord, agents and solicitors and questioning our actual sanity, we finally took occupation of 62, Fore Street; previously The Sitting Rooms and soon-to-be The East Gate Bookshop. Key in hand we finally entered an empty space and tried to contemplate how on earth we were going to create a bookshop here to open on our target date of 12th December. We had to – we had no choice, without Christmas trading our fledgling bookshop would never get off the ground

So we set about making a bookshop in twelve days; building shelves, painting shelves, ordering books, connecting the phones, the broadband, the card machines, the tills, putting in plug sockets… well the list seemed endless and the task impossible, but we had to do it and twelve days later, with lots of help from wonderful friends and family, very little sleep and still functioning on adrenalin and dreams we opened on Saturday 12th December 2020.   The town turned out to support us and it was all we could do to not collapse sobbing in the corner…

And now we are celebrating our first birthday and we are so proud of our bookshop and so indebted to all the people who have supported us. 

We now have our Books and Beers book group hosted by our great friends with the excellent beer, New Lion Brewery. We’ve held numerous events, in-store and at the amazing Totnes Cinema and hope to ramp up our author events program even more in 2022.

Robin Ince explaining The Importance of Being Interested

We’ve also opened up our mezzanine; added in a range of poetry, classic and arts books and opened up our gallery/reading room for people to relax in. We also managed to get a piano up there! We might even put a coffee machine in for January and see how it goes…

So as we head into the busiest few weeks of the year we’d like to say: Thank you all so much for your continued support during our bookshop’s first year.