Interview – Daunt Books Summertown
The leafy Oxford suburb of Summertown boasts buzzing bistros, cute cafés and some of the greatest window displays in independent-bookdom. Elizabeth Perry, manager of Daunt Books, explains how she ensures maximum ‘stand-out’ for her stock, while merging fact and fiction on the shopfloor.
Elizabeth, tell us about your career…
I left university knowing I wanted to work with books but not having much of a plan beyond that and got a part-time job at an independent bookshop a few months after graduating. I fell in love with the job, went full-time, and after a few years I moved to Daunt Books, taking a role managing a new branch in Oxford that was due to open early 2020… Other things got in the way that year but we did eventually open in August 2020.
Tell us about Daunt…
Daunt Books was founded in the 90s as a travel specialist bookshop on Marylebone High Street, and since then has expanded, both in terms of stock and number of branches. We’ve kept the travel angle, with half of our shop organised by location, where you’ll find fiction and non-fiction set or about a particular place shelved alongside each other. As someone who didn’t read non-fiction before bookselling, this is one of my favourite things about the shop - so often the fiction and non-fiction are on opposite sides of a shop or potentially even completely different floors and feel really separate. With our method, the opportunity to discover something unexpected while browsing doubles. When I realised you could read non-fiction for fun a whole new world opened up, and now I read about fifty-fifty…
I discovered Daunt Books Publishing around 2017 - the publishing arm was founded in 2010, and I came across their reissues of John McPhee, a non-fiction writer I now adore, and Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk by Kathleen Rooney, which I still recommend all the time. The Daunt list has gone from strength to strength since then, publishing original work including Real Life by Brandon Taylor which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel which was longlisted. The publishing team are very impressive and it is a real perk of this job to get to work with them!
Tell us about displaying books…
Shop displays are mostly driven by new titles, with some exceptions - we have a ‘favourites’ table, full of titles our booksellers love, fiction and non-fiction, and mostly backlist. The layout of the shop also means there are some location-focused tables too, with new fiction and non-fiction relating to the shelves nearby. Tables are primarily paperbacks, but you’ll find hardbacks on the till, and there’s a large table of new hardbacks near the front of the shop, with the rest face out on various display shelves. Tables are stacked in pyramids - making it a bit easier for browsing and allowing us to have different quantities of titles displayed neatly. I think of these like the tentpole movie principle - the middle, largest pile will be the big sellers (on my crime table that might be Mick Herron) and the edges can be the lesser-known things you still want to highlight (for me that might be Margot Douaihy.) We’ve also got an Oxford section, which displays year-round books about Oxford - photography, art, architecture, fiction, reportage, local self-published authors - a real mix. Most books won’t be on display for very long - it’s a small shop with limited space, and there are new books coming in all the time.
Tell us about your window displays…
We’ve got a really large shopfront, which means lots of window space. There’s always a mixture of new titles for children and adults, and turnover is frequent, mostly dictated by how many new titles are coming in and how the books in the window are faring in the sunlight. We also do feature displays when a bookseller really loves a book - that’s my second favourite part of the job (the first is events, which might need to wait for a separate interview!) It’s an opportunity to get a bit creative, and to try and help a book find readers in a very competitive field. It can be nerve-wracking to throw your weight behind something, and it takes a little time, trial and error to figure out what your customers might find interesting, but it’s so wonderful to see a book you love really take off.
Our Headshot window was really special, as it was a book from our publishing team, and a book I felt so strongly about. I started by sourcing a bunch of red boxing gloves on Depop, and made a bunch of posters advertising the boxing tournament that is the centre of the book. It’s a lot of fun coming up with a concept - the main character in Like a Charm by Elle McNicoll, Ramya, is always wearing a beret, so we had a bunch of brightly coloured berets strung up, and I spent a few evenings embroidering red hearts onto a pink one, to represent the first beret Ramya is given (that we then gave to a customer afterwards, who took a shine to it!.) For Uprooting by Marchelle Farrell, my colleague Andy built a wooden tree and tied copies of the book to the branches with green ribbon. For Chronicles of a Lizard Nobody by Patrick Ness, Alice created a red and orange explosion with copies of the book flying out of it. And sometimes we get the author/illustrator in to build a window - Hannah Peck has done some beautiful ones for her books Kate on the Case and The River Thief, and Yuval Zommer painted a gorgeous window celebrating his book The Wild.
What are you doing for Christmas?
The Christmas window is a major operation and stays in for longer than any other display - about two months normally. There’s no feature, as it’s filled with as many of the year’s books as we can fit. We try and mix things up each time; last year we had a snowy forest with a woodsman, this year we’ve got a Dickens writing room and a train that moves. It’s hard work, but so rewarding.
What does a good bookseller do? How much do they read?
I don’t think there is a right amount to be reading each week, and I am very pro not finishing books you’re not enjoying, so I think my general theory is anti-numbers and pro vibes… sometimes you’ll have the time and energy to read loads, sometimes you won’t, and that’s before even considering how quickly or slowly you read. I am lucky to be a fast reader, but my concentration really comes and goes, so sometimes I’m reading several books a week and sometimes it’s just a few a month. There’s no telling what will do it, either - I loved Orbital by Samantha Harvey but it took me weeks to read despite being 160 pages long, whereas I raced through 560 pages of Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe. Mixing things up helps - audiobooks on the walk to work, for example - and being led by what I want to read, rather than what I feel like I should read. A standout book I read this year was Bunker by Bradley Garrett, a non-fiction book about bunkers from several years ago, and I came across that just by wandering around the library, having given up on a certain big-hitting bestseller.
In terms of staying on top of new books, we get to see a lot via proofs or early reading copies from the publishers, and being in the shop regularly unpacking deliveries also means you see things as they come in. Other sources include Instagram, emails from The Bookseller, reading reviews with an open mind and a little bit of suspicion (one of my all-time favourite books, My Autobiography of Carson McCullers by Jenn Shapland, is one I read after reading a bad review of it!) - and listening to the customers. There’s so much out there, so I’m always interested in what they are choosing to pre-order or coming in to ask for. This year I’ve read Whalefall by Daniel Kraus and Moon Road by Sarah Leipciger thanks to customer requests - two very different books I would never have read otherwise… and I got both from the library. Oxfordshire is very lucky to have exceptional public libraries.
How should an author engage with booksellers to ensure they are equipped to talk about their book?
Have a good, brief elevator pitch. I think another good approach is one similar to trying to get published - you want to be familiar with the journal or agent you’re submitting to, so you don’t try and sell your sci-fi romance to someone who only publishes history, etc. Get to know the shop, and the booksellers. There’s no magic trick for getting a display unfortunately - the only way that’ll happen is if one of the booksellers loves the book, and if you manage to get a reading copy into their hands, remember you’re competing for their reading time and attention with a lot of other books. Be polite and informed, don’t take things personally, remember the bookseller knows their shop and customers, and if you’re emailing ahead, make sure your email is addressed to the right bookshop and doesn’t start Dear Sirs…
What’s selling well this year, and what have you been surprised about?
Claire Keegan - all her books - and Orbital are the first that come to mind as selling well. In our shop, The Art Thief by Michael Finkel, All the Beauty in the World by Patrick Bringley and Unsheltered by Barbara Kingsolver - those are all bookseller-driven!
Why should everyone visit Daunt Books Summertown?
Come to our events. You don’t have to have read the book first, there’s no spoilers, test or audience participation - in fact, I think they’re a great way of deciding whether or not to read book, like watching a trailer for a film - and it’s a nice way of getting to know the shop and staff, as well as hearing tips and tricks from authors who’ve made it to the events stage. Tickets are just £5 including a glass of wine or soft drink, which is a bargain…
Any final advice to writers looking to get their books stocked by you?
If you’re self-publishing make sure the spine of your book has title and author on it - if it’s blank it will disappear into the shelves.
++ Find out more about Daunt Books Summertown here, its events here and Elizabeth’s book recommendation newsletter here. And if you’re a writer, consider signing up to our Substack for free weekly writing prompts, news and submission opportunities, plus interviews like this one… and this one, and this one too.