A new secondhand bookstore opened in Oxford city centre last week. Located in the Golden Cross shopping centre, just off Cornmarket Street, the bookstore stocks hundreds of secondhand books, ranging from accessibly priced paperbacks to rare and expensive antiquarian first-editions. It was previously home to dessert cafe Fluffy Fluffy, and before that, it was an optician’s.
Its four co-directors, Helen Flatley, Mehdi Bensenane, Scott Moynihan, and Sumner Braund, who have backgrounds in medieval history and philosophy, opened the store in order to provide a boost to secondhand bookselling in Oxford. Helen, a medievalist and history lecturer at the University of Oxford as well as co-director of the store, said: “Some of us did our PhDs here and have been thinking for quite a while that Oxford needs more secondhand bookshops, so that was the inspiration for it.”
“Effectively, we’ve built the kind of bookshop we ourselves would like to go to”, Helen told Cherwell. The store stocks a wide range of genres, including ancient philosophy, medieval and modern history, and fiction. Its site dates from 1496 and is thought to have links to Shakespeare. According to the store’s Instagram page, the bard is rumoured to have stayed in the building in the seventeenth century, when it was a coaching inn. He is also rumoured to have put on a production of Hamlet in the Golden Cross courtyard. The courtyard itself is one of the oldest parts of medieval Oxford, dating back to the thirteenth century, Helen explained.
The owners said they have been delighted with the response they’ve had since opening the store in May, especially from students. “We’ve been especially heartened by the amount of students that have been in”, Helen told Cherwell. The store aims to cater to students’ needs both in terms of stock and prices. Helen said: “It’s one of the things that we thought would be important, to have a range of prices, so we have many books that are accessibly priced, as well as some more rare and expensive things.”
Some of the store’s most noteworthy antiquarian books include a first-edition copy of George Orwell’s 1984, priced at £1000, and a 1863 copy of George Eliot’s Romola, priced at £200. The store also stocks some early illustrated editions of Shakespeare. The owners hope to expand the antiquarian side of the business, Helen told Cherwell.
As well as catering to students’ needs, the owners hope the store will provide tourists with a special insight into Oxford. Mehdi Bensenane, a philosopher originally from Paris, said: “When people come to Oxford, they do not go to Disney World or Paris or London, they come here for a reason. They are interested in the history of the place, in the humanities, and in the sciences.
“But Oxford can be rather opaque when you think about it from a tourist’s point of view. Buildings are defined not so much by what they do but who was their benefactor – Ashmolean, Bodleian. Colleges can be hard to access, too, as you have to pay to look around. So we wanted to create that Oxford feel, but with an open door. We’re hoping to create a network and a feeling of community for independent bookshops, whilst addressing the expectations of local communities and tourists.”
A number of Oxford’s independent shops have been threatened with closure recently. Riverman Records, a second-hand record shop and music store on Walton Street with a cult following, is facing an uncertain future as its landlord has submitted a planning application to turn the premises into living accommodation. Oxford’s longest-running independent cinema, The Ultimate Picture Palace in Cowley, is also facing the prospect of closing after its landlord, Oriel College, refused to extend its lease in order to allow vital investments and renovations.
Blackwell’s on Broad Street used to run a thriving secondhand and antiquarian books section, but has scaled down its operation in recent years. In addition, the future of the Oxfam bookshop on St. Giles’s Street has recently been thrown into doubt after Regent’s Park College, which owns the premises, submitted a planning application to turn the premises into an MCR. The application was rejected by Oxford City Council, and Regent’s Park has said that it is considering its options.
