Delight for Shetland readers as secondhand bookshop opens

Those who want to indulge in some second-hand book buying will find the new bookshop situated by the Weisdale burn in Shetland’s central mainland. It’s housed in what was once a fish hatchery and is just across the road from the art gallery, shop and café at the Weisdale Mill; the temptation of a morning or afternoon visit to both is obvious.

The new venture is the product of much planning and, of course, collecting on the part of Dr Sarah Taylor. Until she retired five years ago, Sarah was Shetland’s director of public health. She and her partner Jim had moved to Shetland from Birmingham in 2000, although both of them hail originally from the north of England. Before we spoke about the bookshop, Sarah reflected on the move, and on the benefits that Shetland offers for medical practitioners.

As she explains, they’d been thinking of a change of scene for a while when the Shetland job came up and they thought it would be “really interesting”.

“I’d never visited Shetland, but we’d holidayed a lot in the Western Isles.” However, “we’d never really thought that the Western Isles as a place that we particularly wanted to move to. It’s a very different set of islands, different to Shetland.”

Part of Shetland’s appeal for her was that, in medicine, “I think it’s a really interesting place. It depends on what sort of medicine you’re doing, obviously; you can’t come here and be a neurosurgeon, or something like that. It’s small and you don’t see a lot of any one thing, clinically. But you see a big range of everything. You’re working in a small team, so it’s very hands-on; and that applies to Public Health, too.”

Sarah contrasts this with Birmingham, where “you’ve got a big team underneath you, and most of what you’re doing is managing people. Now, I enjoy managing people, but I wanted to do hands-on public health as well.”

Another part of Shetland’s attraction for a clinician is that “here, you still get a real continuity of care, and that’s harder to find in other places, where you hand a patient on to a specialist unit very quickly. In a place like this, you get to know your patients, you see them all the way through. When you’re in hospital, or as a GP, you have a relationship with the patient that, in many places, has been lost. It’s not for everybody, clearly, and that’s true of living here. But working here is a great pleasure and, professionally, it’s very interesting.

Overall, Sarah feels that the move north came at the right time for them; the older children did take longer to adjust, though two of them are now settled very happily in Shetland. Jim didn’t move immediately, staying on in Birmingham for about six months, but he, too, found a job and “we wouldn’t want to be anywhere else now.”

Being able to realise a long-held aspiration, in the form of the bookshop, is another part of the islands’ continuing appeal.

Sarah had grown up with books and loved reading. “But my mum died about a year after we’d moved up here and she had a house completely full of books. I went down to stay in her house for a week after she died to sort things out. I was sleeping in the sitting room, surrounded by books, and wondering what I was going to do with all these books. I couldn’t bear to let them go, so we put them into storage.” However, the idea of a bookshop was beginning to form.

“When I made a decision to stop working, I was relatively young, and thinking about what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. A little before I stopped working, this place came up for sale, and it just seemed like an ideal place to open a shop, so that crystallised the whole idea.” However, it was really only when Sarah stopped working that she started collecting books in serious numbers. She hasn’t advertised for books, though: “People just heard about it and got in touch. There were three or four house clearances from people who’d died, and that’s been really interesting, because then you see the whole of somebody’s life.”

Bringing the bookshop to fruition wasn’t without its challenges, including, towards the end, the impact of Covid. Finding tradespeople is often a challenge in Shetland and there was a long delay – about a year – in having the new roof, a ‘green’ one, installed. However, there was no real deadline – “I didn’t want deadlines when I started the project, because that felt too much like work!” During lockdown, Jim spent two months building the bookshelves and they then painted them and “that was fine”, Sarah says.

Storing all the books has been another challenge. “In our house, all the bedrooms that the children were living in are now floor to ceiling with books, along with one room downstairs, and the porch; and then we have a huge number of books in a place up at Clousta. And I’m still paying for storage for my mum’s books – so all those books that started this off, I’ve not even looked at!”

So, how many are there? “I’ve about 15,000 on the shelves in here and probably about 70,000 elsewhere. When I was accumulating them, I was pricing the more valuable ones individually, but I’m only now sorting the rest into genres. I’m spending quite a lot of time on that.” Some of the titles that might be expected to be less sought-after have found a new role in the building of a glass-topped reception desk, where Sarah greets visitors.

All of that behind-the-scenes work is obviously vital, because it will make it so much easier to respond to requests for particular books or topics. Sarah hasn’t yet ventured into online selling, because to do so, she’ll need to be able to put her hand on whatever the customer wants and “I’m a long way from that”.

What of Sarah’s own reading preferences?

“My own reading is generally fiction, though I read biographies of people whose lives I think are interesting, for example Leonard Cohen, Patti Smith and, recently, John Buchan (author of The Thirty-Nine Steps) and Christy Brown. I read a lot of political thinking and social sciences when I was working, but now I tend to read 20th and 21st century novels, from John Le Carré’s spy fiction to American classics such as John Irvine, Alice Walker, Annie Proulx. I love everything by Isabel Allende and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Patrick White, and Graham Greene.”

A favourite for Sarah among modern British authors is Kate Atkinson, “who makes me laugh out loud, as does Marina Lewycka and Carl Hiaasen."

She recently discovered William McIlvanney and his gritty Glasgow underworld, to add to a long list of favourite crime and thriller writers: Patricia Highsmith, Ian Rankin, Lee Child and Ann Cleeve’s Shetland series.

“I also recently read for the first time J G Ballard’s Empire of the Sun and was very moved by it. And in the bookshop, I’m always picking up some of the older books and dipping into them with delight.” Such are the pleasures of running a bookshop!

Whilst any project like this evolves, the bookshop is already – from a customer’s perspective – the finished article, and quite simply a must-visit for all of us in search of something to read. There’s no substitute for being there, but the illustrations offer some clues to the extent and range of the collection, which embraces a wealth of fiction and a truly eclectic selection of non-fiction, ranging from do-it-yourself to postmodern philosophy via travel and history. There’s an excellent choice of books for younger readers, too.

It’s clear that the community has already responded very positively to what is, without doubt, another great asset for the islands. Reading is one of the most life-enhancing of pastimes and we wish Sarah well in her venture.