Word of Mouth... Next Page Books

Next Page Books, Hitchin's only independent bookshop, won Muddy Stilettos' Best Bookshop Award in 2023, was an East of England finalist for Independent Bookshop of the Year at The British Book Awards 2024, and won both Best Indie Local Business and Best Local Shop in 2024's inaugural Mum’s Guide to Hitchin awards.

Stocking an inclusive range of books for children of all ages (and even some for the parents), they also hold author events and story time sessions for little readers, among other things.

Shout or Whisper popped along for a cup of tea with co-owners Julie Anderson and Liz Tye, to hear the story that isn't available on their shelves- the one of the shop, and the people behind it.

Next Page Books, sunlit on Queen Street in Hitchin

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So to start with, could we have a bit of an intro to what Next Page Books is, how you got started, and who you are behind it all?

Julie: Well, we’ve been friends since our oldest children were born, nineteen years ago, and often talked over the years about potentially how lovely it would be to own or run a bookshop- as a lot of people do… Then during lockdown- I’ve always worked in children’s publishing, Liz was teaching- and during lockdown Liz came to the end of teaching and started talking, sort of slightly more firmly about possibly opening a bookshop. Whereas it had always been a little bit kind of dreamy, pie in the sky-

Liz: Eleven o’clock at night with our last glass of wine, going “One day, Julie, one day!”

Julie: And then after our one or two conversations I sort of thought “Oh, well if she’s going to do it, maybe it’s a bit now or never if she were to want to do it with me”, so… that’s kind of what happened. And we opened in Autumn 2021, so we’re three and a half years old now…

Liz: We sort of pounded the ground around Hitchin because we weren’t able to meet inside for all the planning time, or at least quite a lot of it-

Julie: Yeah, the early bit, yeah.

Liz: Because of Covid, because it was probably late 2020, early ’21 that we really started saying we would. And there were all those Covid restrictions, but I’ve got a dog, so that meant we could go on dog walks and then basically go and have business meetings and try and plan it out a bit-

Julie: In a field!

Liz: With the dog, in a field somewhere. I worked in teaching for about eighteen years, a primary school teacher and SENCo, so I had a qualification in special needs when I finished teaching, and it was quite important to us, I suppose- I’ve thought about this quite a lot Julie, I can’t really remember how the conversation came about that we were going to have a focus of neurodiversity, but it was quite important to us that we were going to find something unique and something that hadn’t… been done already, and something we knew a bit about, as well… can you remember?

Julie and Liz, in a rare moment behind the till together.

Julie: I think perhaps our original conversations might have been focusing on inclusivity and diversity in general-

Liz: Yeah, I think you’re right.

Julie: And perhaps we came to that slight conclusion a little bit further down the line, because there are other shops around who do a similar thing in broader terms, different types of diversity and inclusivity.

Liz: There are black-owned bookshops, there are LGBT bookshops, there are, you know, there’s lot of diverse bookshops in that sense, but not for neurodiversity.

Liz: This used to be a Boots chemist. When we first came to look at it we went “Oh, no, we couldn’t cope with that”- there was a desk here, there was all sorts of plastic shelving and cupboards around, wasn’t there? And there was a consulting room over there.

Julie: It was quite dark.

Liz: It was tiny, dark and looked, awful. Then the landlord sort of cleared it all out, painted it white, and it was like walking into a different place, wasn’t it? We sat on that bench for a while counting people to see how many people came past, to see whether it might possibly be viable.

[We pause for a minute while a customer hands in a completed book trail activity page. Their review- it’s a lot of fun!]

Liz: I suppose we started looking for books, didn’t we, that sort of reflected neurodivergence. And realised that there were, then, starting to be more authors who were writing really authentically from their own experience, because previously as a SENCo I would see a box of really uninspiring looking books that were like “I Have Autism”, “Sally has ADHD”.

Julie: Like, educational books, books that look like school and educational books.

Liz: And what we found is that more and more people are writing really, really decent books- our first criteria is it’s got to be a really good book, then we try and look for inclusive and diverse books in all genres, and specifically we get really excited when there’s a book out that’s got a neurodivergent author or neurodivergent character, or both. We realised that we could make that our USP, sort of moved on from there really.

Julie: I mean it has… To some degree, it’s what we do and what we want to do, but it does sometimes cause some confusion among the public because there’s still quite a few people out there, I think, who think that we only deal in diverse books and neurodiverse books which is not the case at all. We are a general children’s bookshop with a specialism in neurodiversity.

our first criteria is it’s got to be a really good book [...] we get really excited when there’s a book out that’s got a neurodivergent author or neurodivergent character, or both.

Liz: And also, that neurodiverse books, or books with neurodivergent characters, are only for people who are neurodivergent and actually they’re just good books, and in the same way- I sometimes use this example, you don’t have to be a wizard to enjoy Harry Potter, you know, you can just learn about someone else’s life. And that’s sort of how we would approach it. But I think there is learning to do from the general public.

And also actually people don’t believe that we’re not just a children’s bookshop, we actually do have a lovely grown up section and we can order anything in that’s currently in print as well. So those two things have been slight hurdles to overcome that we didn’t really expect, I suppose.

Do you think maybe people are curious to know, but find it a bit tricky to come in and while buying a book, to also go “so who are you and what's this all about”?

Liz: You’d be surprised, we have the best conversations. The anti-… you know those supermarket checkouts where they’re throwing everything through and rolling your eyes when you don’t do it quick enough, we’re almost the anti-that. We have some really good conversations in here where people do ask that sort of thing, “How are you doing? What can we do to help?”, it’s really interesting and that’s the side of it we both really love.

We’ve got a couple of members of staff now but we’re both like “No, we need to keep our time in the bookshop” because you could spend all day every day at a computer, can’t you, answering emails, but you don’t know what people want, what people have enjoyed, to see it for yourself. And just to see all the new books!

It's such a privilege of a job. I’ve struggled sometimes to try and compare it to anything. It sort of is like a coffee shop where you know people and they come in, they come in sometimes as much for the chat and seeing if you can help them with a situation as they do to buy a book.

Could we dig in a little bit more on your backgrounds? So, you came from teaching and children’s publishing- how long did you do that for?

Liz: Really early on, The Comet wrote an article when we opened and they described Julie as having decades of experience in children’s books and she was like “I’m not that old”.

Julie: Well it is true, and I am, but it kind of like… felt a bit like an insult rather than a compliment.

Liz: So now I just like saying Julie has decades of experience.

Julie: Yeah, I worked in children’s book publishing and sales for- probably about…

Liz: Decades.

Julie: Two or three decades, yeah. I still do it now, I probably spend about half my working life on the shop and my other half I work for a London-based small company who sell independent publisher’s children’s books into bookshops. That’s the other half of what I do, so I have quite a lot of publisher contacts and product knowledge and experience. I’m still doing it now, and although it’s quite hard work they do complement each other more than, more than… what’s the opposite of complement?

Liz: Not complement?

Julie: Well done, Liz. Not complement.... Conflict!

Liz: Thank goodness for Julie, because she’s got such amazing book knowledge and it’s quite a complicated industry, it’s not as straightforward as going “Ooh, I’d like that”. There’s lot of different ways to get things, how it works is all quite complicated. I was teaching for eighteen years locally, so I taught in quite a few schools in Hitchin, Preston, Stevenage, and left teaching in 2021.

My daughter’s not very well, she’s got ME, my youngest daughter. She’s a teenager. She was not able to be in school and we didn’t know what it was at the time. She was staying at home with my husband and I was going into school, and I thought “What am I doing?”.

I stopped teaching then and we sort of investigated what was going on, and she now learns from home. It made me really question whether I wanted to carry on teaching, I think it’s a really hard time to be a teacher, especially in Special Educational Needs. It sort of… wasn’t for a particularly nice reason but actually it's worked out really well, because then I am the other half of Julie in the shop and then support my daughter learning from home the other half of the time.

I had no business knowledge- honestly, Julie will tell you, I didn’t even know what an invoice was. Having been in teaching my whole career, you just get paid every month and that’s how it ticks along. So I did an online business course with a lovely local lady during Covid, got the basics, and then we’ve sort of taught ourselves from then.

Julie: And you did have quite a lot of educational knowledge, and a really big part of what we do in the shop relates to schools and school’s business. And we probably wouldn’t be able to make things work if we didn’t have that.

Liz: And the contacts, local contacts that I’ve still got through educational things are quite useful to use in the shop as well. It’s probably a good complement, we’re complementary.

Julie: We like to tell people so.

Could you tell us a bit more about some of the events you do, the story times, the book trail, things you do with schools?

Liz: It’s like we’ve planned someone to come in and go “I’ve just finished the book trail!”

Julie: It is important to us to be seen as a community space, to be seen as a safe community space for everybody. I think we do have some very loyal customers now who understand and appreciate that. We run a  free story time on a Wednesday morning which is a very young, baby sort of age story time, run by some amazing volunteers, and a Saturday one that’s a tiny bit older because there’s a craft involved that tiny babies wouldn’t be able to do. They’re both free.

We also run various author events as and when they come up. We have a local author, Frances, coming in tomorrow because it’s the school holidays, in the afternoon to do a nice free story time and craft. They don’t always result in extra sales for us, but sometimes it’s just awareness- those people might come back another time, or tell other people that you exist…

Liz: And for some families as well, it’s just really important to get out, isn’t it? When you’ve got small children, and something to do. Hang out with other kids, and the kids learn-

Julie: Speak to adults, maybe.

Liz: - speak to adults, those things we try and approach in a sort of, not necessarily for-profit way but a "what can we do for the community?" way.

reading for pleasure is equally as important for everybody. Just because you’re dyslexic doesn’t mean you’re not going to read for pleasure, it should be encouraged.

Julie: In relation to things like the trail, World Book Day is in early March every year and it’s a really busy time of year for us, second only to December probably. We do masses and masses of school book fairs during that time, and we also work with authors, illustrators, publicists, to get people to come to the shop and do some events during March. We did four of those that have come to an end in the last few weeks. We did one with Danny Pearson for the Beano- do you know Danny?

Liz: He works for Hitchin BID now, but he writes for the Beano as well. He’s a very vocal person to support Hitchin. He’s been very big supporter of ours since we opened- he even dressed up as the Gruffalo on our opening day!

Julie: We paid him in beer. Not while he was the Gruffalo-

Liz: That’s not allowed.

Julie: After he was the Gruffalo. We did four Saturday events that coincided with Hitchin Children’s Book Festival- a group name that we give to that period of the year and the events we do. And we developed the trail, and this is the third or fourth year that we’ve put it together.

Liz: Twelve local businesses, and there’s a book-related clue in the window of each one. The kids take a trail, fill in the book and the author, bring it all back here and all the businesses donate a prize. We draw a prize draw at the end to see who gets the prize. Again, that’s free- people come in, either don’t buy a book, buy a book. There are certain things that we do that are community-related but we also sometimes have to get our business head on and go “we do need to actually make some money.” That’s a bit of a fine line.

This year's World Book Day Hitchin Book Trail, touring clues across local independent businesses.

Julie: It is, a bit of a see-saw I think. And we’re not a community interest company, we did consider it when we first set up. We could still go that way in the future but you need to set your business up very differently if you do do that.

Liz: Quite a complicated kind of way.

Julie: Yeah, and also we’ve got to kind of, pay your bills haven’t you. But it is a priority for us to do community stuff. We get people to come and paint our windows whenever that’s a possibility, they nearly always look really great and we get lots of comments on them, people passing. It’s nice. [Recent window designs have included artwork from Mariajo Illustrajo & Clare Fennell].

Liz: Stuck in traffic, they’ll look in our window and they do eventually come back in. But actually people do say “It just makes me smile when I walk past” or “It looked really cheery.”

Julie: They look out for when it changes, so that’s nice.

I noticed, where you were saying you’ve got a specialism in neurodiversity as well as general readership and general trade, I noticed as well as books you’ve got various… would you call them aids?

Liz: Yeah, sensory aids.

Like the reading rulers and things like that- how easy has it been to source those as extra products around the books?

Liz: Not particularly easy. It was something that I used to do when I worked in special needs was have, in my class, a selection, because- the thing is with all of these things, they only work if you’ve got the right one for you. So if you say to someone “here’s a red pencil grip that feel’s like this”, it may or may not work for them but you can’t then say “well, pencil grips don’t work”.

[We pause again as a second book trail is handed in. The review? They had fun doing it, but they have tired legs now.]

Liz: It hasn’t been easy to source that stuff, but it is quite important and people do come in and they can sort of try and feel them. Feel a pencil grip, try out different coloured reading rulers to see which one suits them best, because with most of those things there isn’t actually a “If you’re dyslexic, red’s going to be best”, or you know, “If you are struggling with handwriting, this one is best”. It’s all about trying stuff out and seeing what suits you the best. It has been quite important to us to have them.

Julie: We’d probably like to have more, a bigger range of that, if we could source these things more easily. Displaying things like that can tricky sometimes as well, you need to sometimes investigate display options.

Liz: And we’ve got things- there’s one publisher, Barrington Stoke, who only publish… they call them ‘dyslexic-friendly’, I’d quite like it to be ‘neurodivergent-friendly’ actually because they suit a lot of different needs. But they only publish their books in a new dyslexia-friendly font, and with tinted background, and with extra spacing, choosing the words really carefully. So we try and stock things that, you know, support different needs as well.

Julie: We have a big Barrington Stoke selection, don’t we? And teachers who we’ve formed relationships with over the three years, some of those teachers will say to families and parents “Go to Next Page Books and you can get some good reading stuff there”, because reading for pleasure is equally as important for everybody. Just because you’re dyslexic doesn’t mean you’re not going to read for pleasure, it should be encouraged.

Liz: And there’s loads of evidence and research done that if you read for please, your life chances increase, in all sorts of different ways. So if you are dyslexic or have ADHD, that’s sort of limiting yourself, isn’t it? So we don’t really have phonics schemes, we don’t really have reading schemes, that sort of boring “Cuh-Ah-Tuh”, although we do get asked for it, don’t we? We’re more about reading for pleasure, I would say, as a bookshop. They can get that sort of stuff in school.

The sensory aids and titles stocked for neurodivergent readers include reading rulers and titles from Barrington Stoke.

Has Hitchin changed at all since you started running the shop, and if so, how?

Liz: I thought you were going to say “Has it changed at all?”, and I have lived here since I was two, so it has changed quite a lot since then…

Let’s open it up! How’s it changed since you’ve known Hitchin?

Liz: Well, funnily enough my parents moved out of Hitchin because they couldn’t get a family home for a decent price, and that was like thirty-five, forty years ago and it’s still the case now, so maybe it hasn’t changed that much…

Julie: That’s interesting, because people say “you used to be able to get” just exactly that for a decent price in Hitchin, so I wonder…

Liz: Not in the early eighties, I would say.

Julie: Perhaps that was even earlier.

Liz: There just weren’t loads of ‘bigger’ houses, I think that’s sort of the point. We used to go to- I loved it, actually- because the outdoor pool didn’t have all the wall and everything around it, it was just in the middle of Butt’s Close as a park. You’d sort of go and pay- we’d go after school, probably cost 20p or something- we’d take a picnic, and just go and sit in the park after school and just go in and out of the pool all evening. That was quite nice.

But has it changed since we opened? I mean, we opened and it was still Covid-y times, I would say. It wasn’t full on lockdown but we did notice at certain points we had to have screens up, and we had to put in place some Covid restrictions. And we did notice when it was, you know, spiking again that we had fewer customers, but we weren’t in that time that everything was closed.

Julie: Um… I do think that, I think it’s reasonably well known that people talk about not being able to afford to live in Hitchin now, and I don’t think I’ve lived here for long enough to make those sorts of comparisons but- we do get families coming into the shop, our most popular sort of age of child, if you like, is young families whose children are probably under five, that’s probably our biggest clientele isn’t it? It’s not that unusual for a couple to come in and say “Oh, we’re househunting” or “We’re moving-"

Julie & Liz: “out of London”

Julie: and we’re househunting. They’re always moving out of London, they’re never moving from, you know, Yorkshire. People say that those are the only people who can afford to move to Hitchin because London is the only place that costs more than Hitchin. So if you want to leave London, you’re the person who can afford to come to Hitchin.

customers come in who are here for a weekend [...] heard it’s a nice place, go to Hitchin Lavender and go out for dinner and come and do some shopping

Liz: I think that’s probably increased as well, since we’ve been here.

Julie: Since you bought your house, your current house, I would imagine. Yeah.

Liz: Absolutely. But also, I do think Hitchin is a really great place to be an independent. The… downside to it is it’s a great place and the rent for retail property are sky-high, but actually it’s quite a nice community feel, lots of people try and help each other out, and people who live in Hitchin really support an independent business.

Julie: Or at least a lot people who live in Hitchin do. I would say that sometimes on those Facebook groups you get quite a lot of people saying “I wish we had a Primark, I wish we had a Matalan”.

Liz: I do agree, but then we do get lovely customers who come who say “I’m choosing to only get children’s birthday presents from you”, or “I’m not going to buy any books online”.

Julie: Like that older lady who was here for a good hour, and she did only buy that one book, but when she came in I sort of asked if she wanted help, she said “I’m just going to have a look, I love it in here”.

People also come here as a destination for shopping as well, don’t they? People who do support that kind of lifestyle.

Liz: I think that’s maybe increased since the Premier Inn opened round the corner. I don’t know how long ago that was, but we definitely have had customers come in who are here for a weekend who would sort of come- relatively cheap Premier Inn, heard it’s a nice place, go to Hitchin Lavender and go out for dinner and come and do some shopping. So we have had people come for the weekend. I know that’s something Hitchin BID were trying to increase in terms of reach.

I think that helps, actually, having our specialism. Though at various points we’ve gone “Is it too niche?”, actually that’s what’s drawn people in from Welwyn or Hatfield, North London, Suffolk-

Julie: Luton-

Liz: Or wherever, you know, further because it is not something you’d find in every town. Stevenage doesn’t have any bookshop now. In fact there was a lady and her daughter in earlier who’d come over from Stevenage, I think it was their first visit, she said they’d definitely be back.

Casting your minds forward, if I could ask you to predict how you think the next five, ten years is going to look in Hitchin, do you have any thoughts on how it might change?

Julie: For businesses?

Or just generally- community-wise, anything you guys do in the area, for the business as well...

Julie: I suppose those music events that they’re having at The Priory are quite a new experience, aren’t they? And we’re quite big fans of live music. Last year we went to one of those evenings, and then this year they’re doing them again in the end of August, similar timing, but then they’re- obviously they’ve cottoned on that they can kind of let out The Priory to other businesses who run festivals and they’ve stuff happening in July as well.

Liz: Funnily enough, my first thought was Club 85, I really hope that that will be around in five to ten years.

Julie: Yeah, that’s important for Hitchin.

Liz: With their proposal of what they’re planning to do and their fundraising, I hope that that will be there. I think it’s just a really odd time isn’t it? Because there’s quite a lot of good will towards independent businesses but there’s quite a lot of people, if not most people, who are having to watch what they spend for a lot of various reasons, and there’s quite a lot of uncertainty isn’t there? At some point I’d really love it to just go “ah, actually it feels a bit more settled.” People do have a bit of spare cash and they’re not having to really think about that much, but maybe that’s a bit utopian of me, I don’t know really.

Julie: How else might Hitchin change?

Liz: They’ve had the plans, haven’t they, to do the Churchgate for years- and that apparently is starting to go through, they’ve had some plans out that they’ve asked for people… I mean, this has happened before, but… I think there’s a lot more that could be, that could happen in Hitchin, around the river and things. It could be, it could be even better than it is. But ultimately I think it all comes down to money at the moment, doesn’t it?

Julie: And possibly what does or doesn’t happen in Hitchin, like almost anywhere else, will partly depend on the government and specific policies…

Liz: And I love that, that you can walk out and get 20 different types of food, or 17 different types of sourdough loaf within Hitchin, you don’t have to go far. And that’s why we think “Oh, let’s go and try that”, “let’s go see this band”, and that’s the joy of having events in here too. It’s another string to like “ooh, let’s go and see that author”. We try really hard to keep our events to either very popular, widely popular, but also to really champion neurodiverse authors, diverse in general.

Can you see that book there, How to be Disabled and Proud? Do you know Cathy Reay? Cathy lives in Hitchin, she’s a disabled mother to her two children, and she’s written this amazing book. She writes a column for The Guardian, she does a lot of professional stuff. She’s completely brilliant- and that evening [a book launch with Cathy Reay and illustrator Jaleel Hudson] you could have heard a pin drop, she’s amazing. So we’re trying to focus ourselves to get known within that circle of things, adult authors to come and speak to other adults as well as the children’s events which are slightly different.

You’ve touched on this a bit already, and I know it won’t directly have affected how you were running the shop given you weren't open yet, but - five years since the first lockdown did that period have any impact on how you do things?

Did it, for example, have any hand in cementing in your minds “Yeah, let’s do this”?

Julie: Probably did for you, didn’t it?

Liz: I think it gave me space to think about it. I think if I’d just carried on teaching, and, I mean my daughter wasn’t very well then so the two things I think meant that I was at home quite a lot and gave me the time to go “actually, is this what is best for the family, is this what I want, is this?”. Sometimes a pause gives you a bit of time to think. I’m not certain I would have come to that decision… I don’t know, I don’t know-

Julie: Or it might just have taken you longer. I don’t know with Covid… I was still working in my other job during the first lockdown, working from home quite a lot. Some of our people were on furlough, but I wasn't. I don’t know that I would ever have come to the shop if Liz hadn’t instigated it.

Liz: So maybe in a funny way it might not have happened when it did, or it might not have happened. Because I was still teaching in the first lockdown, I remember driving through Hitchin on one of the first days and I was a key worker, and there was nobody else there. It was like being on a movie set, really odd, going to school.

Julie: And were you in school every day that you were meant to be in?

Liz: Yeah. But there was only a limited number of children, but I was also asking local businesses to donate laptops so that we could get laptops for all the kids out there. So I was driving round to pick up laptops from wherever, or like dropping food in to families who were due to have free school meals, the kids should have had free school meals… Dropping food over there.

Julie: So you weren’t really doing the teaching job, it was more the kind of jack of all trades-

Liz: Social work. Checking in with families, making sure how they are doing, because we were not seeing them in school every day and had that duty of care. I just think the whole thing was just odd, and it made me really think “What do I actually want to do?”

Julie: With the business, we had that sort of mini lockdown in December ’21, that was a bit kind of… that was when we had to invest in some screens-

Liz: Hand sanitiser-

Julie: Well, I don’t know how much we had to, and how much we just did.

Liz: I remember Hitchin BID brought round some stickers, posters and stuff, so maybe it was sort of advised.

Julie: And that was not their first rodeo, whereas we were not around for the first rodeo.

Liz: The other thing I do think that it’s made people think, is that whole working from home thing where people worked from home, were furloughed, then found they could work from home, then stayed working from home. And then pop out in their lunch break to come and get a book for someone’s birthday, or get a haircut, or go and get a coffee and stayed working from home-

Julie: Or at least partly.

Liz: Yeah, and actually this year our Saturdays have become busier, but for certain points our Saturdays weren’t our busier day. It was mid-week days were busier, with families and with people who were working from home. I think it has made people take stock of where they live and think “What is it that we actually want to see here? Because we could buy it all online but actually we’ll choose not to because we want these businesses to still be here", so I think it made a lot of people take stock, I suppose.

Because we were friends before we had the shop we’ve got common interests anyway

Is there anything that you’ve specifically gone “It’s more worth my time doing this now”. Has there been any outlook shift?

Julie: I think from your point of view, yours would be more personal than shop-related, I suppose. For me, I don’t think the shop itself necessarily operates differently, as a result of Covid…

Liz: No, I don’t know if the shop does. I think it definitely made me think, number one when we were in lockdown the only thing I wanted to do was travel, and that has definitely made me go “Right.” And we as a family prioritise that over quite a lot of other stuff. But, just health as well- because my daughter’s been poorly, that sort of changed my complete outlook on that I suppose.

In terms of the shop, not really. And actually what we found, there was a few people who published things, weren’t there, like picture books about lockdown- and, you know, we found no one wanted to read them.

Julie: I think if they managed to publish something when it was still really happening, because there was an Owlet book there sold before we were open-

Liz: The sort of “Why are we all wearing masks”, that sort of thing.

Julie: But once you were not doing those things any more, they were dead in the water.

Liz: Once we stopped having lockdowns, people didn’t really want to read about it.

Julie: And I think to some degree they still don’t. I think the history is a bit too recent. But now we are five years in, I would imagine- although I haven’t seen much about them, because they would be grown up books- but there must be people who are doing, you know, “Our Covid Years” and so on.

Liz: I’m reading that at the minute [Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout] and she mentions Covid. They’re in America, but she talks about Covid within the book. We went to conferences and things, and heard authors speak- and for the first two years we were open, every single author started their speech with “During Covid, I realised I wanted to write a book”. There were some really good books to come out of that time- I do wonder whether it might show itself at some point as being, maybe not a Golden Age but it gave people time to think, time to go “Actually, I could do that”- but from a listening point of view it was a bit “tell me about the book, I don’t need to know that you also started writing in Covid.”

Julie: I guess it was just having free time, isn’t it, that most of us don’t have.

The ever-brimming new book table, including How to Be Disabled and Proud by Cathy Reay (illustrated by Jaleel Hudson) which Next Page hosted the book launch for in April.

Last question- how do you both relax in your spare time? How do you unwind?

Julie: Reading! Well, reading is quite a big part of our lives, yeah. Which is probably reassuring.

Liz: We spend quite a lot of time going out in Hitchin, usually in paces that we can walk home within ten to fifteen minutes of where we live. And just listening to live music-

Julie: Yeah, we all like live music. Because we were friends before we had the shop we’ve got common interests anyway with other friends as well. What else do we like doing?

Liz: One cinema trip a year?

Julie: My family quite like eating out. I love the cinema. Liz doesn’t like it quite as much because you’re not allowed to talk, she finds that quite restrictive.

Liz: Quite challenging, I’d say. I think, actually, it has been an interesting learning curve for us because when we do go out, we don’t tend to talk about the shop. We have a monthly pub meeting where we go out, the two of us, and we take a bigger view of the business out of the business. But when we do go out with friends and that we try to- like, we don’t have business meetings in Club 85 or we don’t go “ooh, yeah, what about this?”

for one event we partnered with Fabio's so that everyone that came got an ice cream. We’re interested in doing more of that sort of thing

But actually, during the week, it is quite hard to keep a balance- because you’re working, I’m doing stuff at home, but things occur to us so we’ve got this very well used WhatsApp chat which has got our lives on it basically.

Julie: Another nice thing I think, is that we are very interested in other independent businesses in Hitchin. We probably don’t know some of them as well as I’d like to, because when you’re here in the shop we’re not normally together, you’re here on your own, so we don’t often do popping out.

But there are a few businesses we know- Felix down at Farley’s, the ladies down at Wild Ivy. Last year for one event we partnered with Fabio's so that everyone that came got an ice cream. We’re interested in doing more of that sort of thing and getting to know other local businesses, collaborating with them too. It's one of the ways that the Book Trail helps, we get to know who else is around when we're asking businesses to put up clues.

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Next Page Books will be selling copies of Overspill by Charlotte Paradise at the next Shout or Whisper event, SoW Presents: Author talks with Charlotte Paradise.

You can keep up with Next Page Books' other upcoming events here.