Monday Musings: #1 Why WHSmith matters

High street newsagent, stationer and bookseller WHSmith has announced that many, if not most, if not all of its stores are to close. Perhaps some will be sold, and so remain open, although as we understand it any sale of WHSmith assets will not include a licence to use the WHSmith name so it seems that it will not be long before yet another familiar name will have vanished from the high street.

This is all kinds of bad.

"But Regie", I hear you say, "aren't you Harrogate's independent comic shop? A champion of indie business? Surely you don't care about the fall of a corporate high street behemoth?"

And to that I say, "You couldn't be more wrong."

WHSmith's, specifically the large branch of WHSmith's that occupied a three storey unit in Doncaster's Frenchgate Shopping Centre was where I bought the first album* I ever bought. It is where I bought the first books that I ever bought for myself with my own money. Much, much more importantly, given what I now spend both my personal and professional life doing, it is where I bought my first ever comic.

2000 A.D. prog #525, since you ask.

Now, it is certainly the case that I eventually moved on to buying books from the independent bookshops that are now such an important part of my life (big shout out to Imagined Things in Harrogate and Fred's Bookshop in Ambleside) and to buying comics from independent comics stores (starting with the much missed Nostalgia and Comics on Matilda Street in Sheffield and progressing through many, many more before finally settling on the store I now own). But that was quite a long journey. If the longest of journeys starts with a single step, that step, the step that started the journey that has defined my life for the last 45 years and more was taken in WHSmith's.

I strongly suspect that I am not alone.

Now, of course I would prefer it if all books were bought from independent bookshops, newspapers from independent newsagents, all comics from independent comics shops and all stationery from independent stationers. But that is not the world we live in.

The uncomfortable truth is that people who don't think of themselves as "book lovers" can be a little intimidated by independent bookshops. People who don't think of themselves as "comics readers" are absolutely intimidated by comic stores.

I mean, seriously, our store is literally in the foyer of a cinema. The movie-goers of Harrogate have to literally walk past our entire store in order to get to the lift. We really couldn't be more physically accessible, there is absolutely nothing to prevent people wandering into our shop - we don't even have our own door!

And yet those new customers who do wander in almost always open the conversation with "I don't really know anything about all of this stuff but..." Now, obviously it's our job to make those new customers feel welcome and put them at their ease and I like to think that we are quite good at that. I take some genuine pride and no small amount of joy from the conversations that I've had with people discovering comics for the first time - it is one of the true perks of the job.

But now imagine that our store wasn't based in the open-plan foyer of a popular and successful cinema. Imagine that we had a small shop front with graphic novels and perhaps a large Batman standee in the window. How many of those nervous, uncertain people who "really don't know anything about this stuff" would feel emboldened to wander in?

Well I can tell you. Because before moved our comic shop to Harrogate's Everyman Cinema we had such a shop front. And do you know how many nervous but curious would-be comics readers wandered in? It wasn't zero. But it was a number not a great deal higher than zero.

The truth is that people are only going to make the effort to visit an in dependent comic shop or an independent book store if they already know that they want to buy comics and books. There needs to be something out there that makes people want to step outside their comfort zone and step over the threshold for the first time. We can make ourselves welcoming and helpful once they're in, but we can't make them take that first step.

For many, certainly for me, WHSmith's was where that first step could happen.

This might be less of a problem for my book shop friends - libraries are an accessible safe space for taking your first steps into books. But I know from bitter experience that many libraries, especially school libraries can be incredibly hostile to comics. (Not all, by any means, but as a trained educator and literacy advocate I have seen attitudes to graphic narrative in some school libraries that have contributed significantly to my ever advancing hair loss**.)

So if WHSmith disappears, where exactly will the next generation of comics readers buy their first comics?

Old fashioned News Agents? Hardly. There are so few of those left now you are more likely to run into Lord Lucian competing with Bigfoot at Unicorn jousting than be able to find the kind of local "paper shop" that was once a feature in every small community. You might, if you're very lucky be able to find a "local" supermarket, or even a full size supermarket that has a reasonable selection of comics, but they rarely have anything like the selection that Smith's currently carries.

If and when Smith's closes its doors on the high street for the final time we will be losing something that really cannot easily be replaced. It might sound melodramatic, but I genuinely worry that one of the doors not just to comics, but to literacy and reading for pleasure will be closed forever. There are things that people like me can do to try and mitigate that damage (about which more next week) but that doesn't mean that damage won't be done.

*Well, it was on cassette because it was the eighties and there was no record player in our house...

**I have positive stories about this too of course, and will be concentrating on those next week...