Every morning, before the lights go on, the owner carries a folding table onto the pavement and covers it with paperbacks priced at a pound. By ten, a small crowd has formed.
It is not, she admits, a profit centre. “The table loses money. The shop behind it makes money because of the table.” People who would never have crossed the threshold stop to look, and a surprising number follow the books inside.
The lesson for other independent shops is not to copy the table but to notice what it does: it lowers the cost of a first visit. The best doors, she says, are the ones you can walk through without deciding to.
Other shops have taken notice. A bookseller two streets away has started its own table, stocked with local-history pamphlets, and the library nearby now leaves a trolley of withdrawn books outside on Saturdays. Taken together, the pavement has quietly become part of the reading life of the neighbourhood.
