Book Shop Girl - my day of helping out at a Bookshop

My last book review was of the Bookshop Girl by Sylvia Bishop about a girl who lives in an extraordinary bookshop. I sadly don’t live in a bookshop, but I do love them and would like to work in one, I am luckily enough to have helped out at my Mum’s friends bookshop a few times, and it was great. Here is a bit about one of these times, where I helped out at Mostly Books in Abingdon when it was owned by Mark and Nicki Thornton.

This event was in August 2016, and was to celebrate the publication of another famous picture book character Hugless Douglas books, by illustrator and writer David Melling. Before the event there was lots of preparation, I helped by doing a number of tasks; I put some newly arrived books out on the shelf, this may seem easy but you need to put it on the right shelf, which means you have to get the right age group, subject and put it in alphabetical order of the authors last name. The next thing I did was put up a BFG display. After that I checked to see if there were any books missing off the shelves, and found them out of storage and put them out in the right place.

So who gave me the jobs? Mark and Nicki, (who started Mostly books and owned it up until earlier this year) they told me what to do, and how to do it, plus explained why each job was done in a specific way. There is much more to working in a bookshop, than selling book, it is complicated and interesting!


Very soon the event started, and the shop was full of excited children (and there parents) David Melling was there as was Hugless Douglas himself! David did some drawings and Mark read some stories to the children. Next it was hugs, with Hugless Douglas himself and I took the photographs! I also helped to do craft work with the children, explaining how to do the crafts, and demonstrating, I also put the pieces up on display in the window.

After all the children were gone, there was the huge job of clearing up, and making the shop look perfect again. The whole thing lasted from 9am until 5pm, I helped from 11am until 4pm, I was very tried at the end but I loved it!