Inspiring Older Readers

posted on 13 Oct 2026

The Radical Bookselling History Project

The Radical Bookselling History Project started when four of us who had worked in radical bookshops organised a national conference in Manchester in 2019, open to all the former workers we could trace. Our aim is to celebrate the shops and the people who worked in them. Since then we have traced more individuals who worked in radical bookshops in Britain – we have initially concentrated on the period of the late 1960s to 2000 – and have interviewed and recorded many of these. This was the highpoint of the radical booktrade when there were over a hundred shops at one point and 250 in total over the period – only America had more. Our definition of radical bookshops is broad – only excluding the radical Right and purely New Age shops. It covers all Left-wing shops, feminist, LGBTQ+, Black, peace, environment and some radical development education centres.

We have produced a Newsletter twice a year, sometimes extending to nearly 90 pages. We have not only covered the second half of the twentieth century but some of the earliest radical bookshops in the 1790s onwards, but also other sides of the radical booktrade – distribution, publishing and the ‘trade organisations’ (the Federation of Alternative Bookshops which became the Federation of Radical Booksellers) – and sometimes we have branched out into foreign radical bookshops. We are also keeping in touch with the newer generation of radical bookshops.

We have encouraged individuals to preserve shop archives and find a suitable depository for them. We have collaborated with various organisations – the Bookselling Research Network, On the Record (who initiated the interactive Radical Booksellers Map), the Working Class Movement Library, Bishopsgate Institute, the Senate House Library and the Alliance of Radical Booksellers (which is for shops established this century). We have encouraged the digitisation of the Radical Bookseller, which was the radical equivalent of the mainstream’s Bookseller.

Previously hosted on the website of Left on the Shelf Books, our research now appears on our own new website, and we have added more material including a gallery of images of shops and their publicity material. All the Newsletters and other research pages can be found here, including a listing of every radical bookshop in this country that we have been able to trace.

We welcome offers of articles for the Newsletter, corrections and additions to the Bookshops Listing, photos or documents for the Gallery, and new information on shops and their workers.

Dave Cope

October 2026