Daunt Books

But the typical experience is you go to this fiction section and you don't know which ones have the happy ending, right? It's hard to find a new author for romance in a general list fiction section.

And I think there's something to say, right? Like specialist bookstores have been around forever, right? Daunt Books was a specialist bookstore, right? Um, and it's, it just makes it easier and, you know, not, not necessarily easier because you have to find that community of romance readers.

Um, but if you're going to do something right, I want to do it well.

And I didn't feel like I could do a generalist bookstore.

Yeah

... um, Daunt Books and things like that have usually got a little section of, uh, f- photo books.

Um, anywhere else that I've missed.

And that good old auction site.

I quite like the pilgrimage to the bookstores as well that you describe in the novel.

I think that's a very Aussie reader thing to do to go to London and be like stocking up on all the tote bags from Daunt Books and Gaze the Word.

Are there any bookstores that you have on your list to go to next?

Yes, there's one in Florence that I can't remember the name of, but it's in an old cinema.

This was demonstrated already because these are designed not just to go down to, if you happen to live in Japan, that you could run down to your local Lawson or Family Mart or 7-Eleven.

But they're also designed that you could happily go to Daunt Books on Marylebone High Street as well.

And it was interesting because they... specifically talked about sort of, you know, the inner double pocket where you might put your, yeah, whether your credit card or so your phone doesn't rattle around as well.

So this pajama has been designed with dignity as well.

James Daunt is not a household name, at least in most households, but he always has been in mine.

Years ago, he opened a small independent bookshop in London, Daunt Books, which many people consider their very favorite bookstore.

From there, he somehow went on to revive two of the biggest bookstore chains in the world, Waterstones in the UK and Barnes & Noble in the US.

You could argue that James Daunt helped save the very idea of the bookstore, maybe the printed book itself.

So how did that happen? I wanted him to start from the beginning, so I asked what his sales pitch was when he first opened Daunt Books.

That this is gonna be an amazing bookstore.

We're gonna absolutely nail it, and we're gonna go and take over every other bookstore in the Western world.

[laughs]