Finding Our Niche

A few posts back, while I was writing about how I research an auction shortlist, I mentioned that I was starting to narrow the focus of Ink & Signature Books, and that at some point I would try to explain what that meant properly. This is that attempt.

From reading and collecting to being a bookseller

As a child I would stay awake late reading whatever books I had at home, or whenever I visited family, I would equally hunt down books to read. This naturally expanded into collecting, starting with the full series of my favourite books in paperback and then saving up and spending my birthday money on associated ephemera. This passion grew into collecting an array of modern fiction and fantasy books as an adult. These experiences and my love of books led me to establish Ink and Signature books with the aim of fostering that similar love of books in others, by connecting people with books.

When I started Ink and Signature Books a year ago, I began by reading about starting a bookselling business and that there is a balance between being a generalist and a specialist. I started by buying fairly broadly, partly because I liked a lot of different books and partly because I was still working out what sort of business I wanted this to become. That broad approach was useful, because it forced me to handle all sorts of books, learn what mattered, make mistakes, and slowly work out which parts of the trade I actually enjoyed most.

However, I started to realise that I was less interested in simply finding books that I thought I could sell, and much more interested in the books that made me stop and ask questions and that had an interesting story behind them. My background is in economics, my parents were teachers, and I spent some time in education myself, so I suppose it makes sense that I am naturally drawn to books as a way of understanding how people think, how ideas develop, and how those ideas then shape the world around them.

Over time this is the direction I want Ink & Signature Books to take. I want it to be a place that connects people with books that matter, a place where people can discover and learn, and hopefully a place that helps create the same sort of curiosity about books that I grew up with. Those are fairly lofty goals for a small bookselling business, and the practical reality is that I still work full-time and have limited time and capital, so I cannot build every version of that idea at once.

What I mean by ‘Thought’

So, what does this mean for the business? I will still focus on finding great books at good prices that I think people will love. I will also start to build out a collection that covers books that have shaped, challenged or changed the world around us. I have been calling this focus ‘Thought’ for lack of a better description, and I’ll admit upfront that it is an imperfect word for what I have in mind. The genre is not philosophy alone, though philosophy sits at its centre. It's not economics alone, or sociology, or the history of science. What I'm really chasing is a family of books written by people who were trying to change how their readers saw something: the market, the mind, power, the self, the natural world. Books that describe an idea, or even better books that argued for one, and in doing so influenced the people who read them and the world around them.

If you've spent any time around serious collectors, you'll likely already know the closest thing this category has to a map: 'Printing and the Mind of Man', usually just called PMM. I don't treat the PMM list as gospel, as it's heavily male-orientated and Western focused, but it remains a useful starting point because it shows just how broad the history of ideas can be, moving across philosophy, economics, science, politics, religion and literature.

Where This Leaves the Catalogue

Practically, this means you'll see the stock at Ink & Signature Books lean further into books that argue, provoke, and persuade. You'll still see me handle a beautiful natural history volume or a well-loved children's classic from time to time. There are also still books on offer that do not fit the new niche, and I am comfortable with that. Many of them reflect the books I loved first, the books that drew me into reading and eventually into collecting.

Overall, I think this will be a more enjoyable business to run, will create a more interesting shelf to browse, and will certainly be a better catalogue to research.

Over to You

Do you collect around a theme, or does your shelf resist being tidied into one? I'd love to hear how you think about the books you choose to keep, in the comments below.