We like you, please come again.

Help us be the very best second hand bookshop we can be, for our customers.

I am sitting here in Framlingham Bookshop, looking at tidy shelves packed with books, having one of my ‘are we giving the customers what they want?’ moments. The door is open, classical music (Finzi in this instance) is on the CD player (browsing music should be a new genre). I’ve hoovered the increasingly shabby carpet (who wants new carpet smell over the smell of old paper?) and dusted all the shelves I can see. I’ve opened the kitchen window to let in fresh air (and wasps, sadly, but I do chase them out). The front window display is relatively fresh, filled with books for National Crime Reading Month and Pride Month on display under flowers and flags. Tuesday is one of two market days here in Fram, and I can see bread and cakes, fish, vegetables, and the natural food fill up van. But where is the footfall? Where have you all gone?

Sometimes I feel more like a tourist attraction than a shop that has to pay rent and bills and make a profit. I get lovely comments - ‘Thank you - it's a lovely shop', 'I'll come back with my reading glasses' 'We're staying locally so we'll come back with more time.' 'I'm so glad we've still got physical bookshops.' And then the same people leave the shop without buying anything, rarely to return. They are on holiday, why would they? It is ‘the British way’ - we don’t like to leave a shop with nothing and not say anything. Don’t get me wrong, I love the sound of children giggling in a corner over Dr Seuss, or early twenty-somethings talking earnestly of Russian classics in translation, poetry and the films of Francois Truffaut. It fills my heart with joy. However…

Today it is a summer lunchtime, and I have taken £2.50 since we opened. Someone bought the Orange Penguin edition of The Day of the Triffids and a book from our 50p sale boxes outside. It feels like a meagre return for our efforts.

The state the world is in, I don’t blame people for keeping a tight grip on their finances. We don’t all consider books to be one of life’s necessities. But so many of the same people who love our shop spend nothing in it, and then happily go over the road to spend £10 on coffee and a scone.

So are we not giving you the stock you want? I wrote a post a while back that went what passes for viral in my world. ‘What would you buy?’ described our dilemma as second-hand booksellers and I got some wonderful comments. Happily, it seemed most people were firmly in our camp. So I thought I would move on to specifics. What authors should we look out for in fiction and crime fiction? What authors would you expect to find in a shop like ours? Muriel Spark, Elizabeth Goudge and Barbara Pym or Ali Smith and Barbara Kingsolver? Or both? In which case, in what proportions? Lee Child and Elly Griffiths, or Golden Age mysteries by classic crime writers out of print? Same question. Do you think second-hand exclusively means ‘old’?

Clearly, I am asking you, as a reader, to do some work here, for which I apologise, especially if you replied to the other post. But I’m interested in customer psychology – not so we can market ourselves and make a nuisance of it, but for a bit of customer care. In knowing what people want to read, rather than what publishers tell us we should be reading, we have a huge advantage. Our bookshelves aren’t paid-for slots highlighting the most eye-catching covers or Tik-Tok sensations. We can genuinely curate a selection that will nurture the reading habit and support lifelong passions for history, say, or travel. Our passions – particularly for poetry and classic crime- can come to the fore, but not at the expense of sales. We enjoy a book search and have an ordering service, and we have fun chatting with regular customers. We love our job, but we aren’t doing it as a hobby. We don’t want to be one of those shops people pass and say, ‘they never have any customers – they must be selling drugs/laundering money.’

We also have a small display of Peter Grogan Ceramics, which have proved a big draw, and our shop recently launched a website, at last, through which you can look at and order from more than 6000 books we have online (framlinghambooks.co.uk). We are trying hard to be a sustainable and ethical business and restrict our social media to Bluesky, where we are testing the water. So far, there is hardly a bookshop to be found on there, but I am going through #Booksky in the hope of finding like-minded souls. (If you’re on there, give us a follow!). We would love you to help us make this a real book town.

Framlingham is a lovely little market town, full of independent shops, pubs and cafes and surrounded by lovely countryside walks. It also has a brilliant library and two bookshops – us and Ottie and the Bea, run by an enthusiastic team of people interested in new children’s books. You don’t even need the pubs, cafes, independent shops and a castle to make a day of it.

This bookshop has been open for thirty years, and we have had it for two. We’ll stay here, retirement come – retirement go, but we’d be lost without our customers.

We like you. Please come again.