Bookshop spotlight – Wave of Nostalgia

Submitted: 3rd October 2024

Wave of Nostalgia

A great new series starts today! A visit around bookshops that are brilliant and inspiring!

First up – Wave of Nostalgia – Haworth, Yorkshire

Visit Wave of Nostalgia

Our beautiful little shop is located in a listed building on the famous cobbled hill in the village of Haworth, close to the Parsonage Museum where the Brontes wrote their masterpieces. There’s lots of bookselling competition in the village with the Bronte Museum shop, two secondhand bookshops and several giftshops selling books, so we need to work hard and smart to succeed. We are unusual in many ways, but unique in that we also stock a range of children’s clothing that owner Diane makes by hand plus the fabulously cute Maileg Mice range. Our customers are an interesting combination of regulars (local and remote) and visitors, so pinpoint curation and creative use of space are essentials to satisfy them.

Visit Wave of Nostalgia

They do seem to like us as we’re

the Bookseller Magazine’s ‘Top Independent Bookshop in the North of England’

one of The Times’ ‘Top 12 favourite Bookshops’

featured in The Guardian as one of ‘three brilliant UK Independent Bookshops’

thrice Finalist in the Northern Bookshop of the year

shortlisted for the 2023 and 2024 Small Awards High Street Heroes.

First impressions are so important – the display, look, colours, smell and music all add to the ambiance of the space. We play a classic, chilled mix of music. Fresh flowers are always on display and we make the most of our flexible shop layout, constantly rotating books to the best locations, refreshing the look almost daily.

Visit Wave of Nostalgia

We sell from two small rooms with around 1,000 titles live at any one time so excellent curation is paramount. Consequently we keep a sharp focus on our key themes of strong women fiction/non-fiction, inclusivity and conservation on both the adult and children’s side of the store, giving us strength in a sometimes-overwhelming choice of books.

Using social media, Publishers, proofs and a trusted network of readers, we chose books that have that feminine edge, are hard-hitting, grab your attention & scream ‘Read Me!’. A great example is Lessons in Chemistry which we promoted early & hard from the first read of the proof. We pushed to be first to market with titles that would delight our customers, ensuring there are loads of new titles available for every visit – the tenure of a title in the shop now averages only 9 weeks, even allowing for our ‘core’ lines. We also stock signed/sprayed/special copies where available as a real point of difference.

ANN Cleeves

Visit Wave of Nostalgia

This year we held twenty-two full-blown author events and fourteen book signings featuring famous names such as Kate Mosse, TJKlune, Elly Griffiths, Emma Donohue, Ann Cleeves, Elodie Harper, Laura Shepherd-Robinson & Juno Dawson as well as other favourite authors of ours. The feedback we received from the authors and their audiences was uniformly excellent “It’s a real community event and people travel miles (including myself) to listen to authors and poets read their work”. “Fantastic evening…great venue thx Diane”

Elly Griffiths

Elly Griffiths enjoyed her event that much, she sent her children round to visit the next weekend!

Visit Wave of Nostalgia

We are a unique, successful, innovative small business that people love. (I mean, actually love – they tell us that in so many words… “I LOVE the people in there, I’ve never met people so incredibly knowledgeable and well-read!”)

Diane (c) Wave of Nostalgia

This is how proprietor Diane sees it: “Welcoming people into our shop and looking after them is like holding your own birthday party every day, fun, exciting and magic! Opening a bookshop has changed my life, giving me a different daily perspective. It has expanded my knowledge, increasing my self-esteem and positive energy. Friendships have grown through a love of books and shared reading experiences. It has made me believe anything is possible, changes hopes and dreams into a reality.”

Let’s let our customers have the final word: “An absolute gem of a bookshop for authors and readers alike – it’s truly a marvel. The best Book Shop In the UK without a doubt ”