Tim Waterstone - The Face Pressed Against a Window: A Memoir

THE FACE PRESSED AGAINST A WINDOW

ALSO BY TIM WATERSTONE

Fiction
Lilley & Chase
An Imperfect Marriage
A Passage of Lives
In For A Penny In For A Pound

Non-fiction
Swimming Against the Stream

A Memoir

TIM WATERSTONE

First published in hardback in Great Britain in 2019 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright Tim Waterstone, 2019

The moral right of Tim Waterstone to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN: 978-1-78649-630-0

E-book ISBN: 978-1-78649-631-7

Paperback ISBN: 978-1-78649-632-4

Printed in Great Britain.

Atlantic Books
An Imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd
Ormond House
2627 Boswell Street
London WC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

For my children: Richard, Martin, Sylvie, Amanda, Maya, Oliver, Lucy and Daisy, with my undying love, gratitude and admiration.

Part One
Where the Children of My Childhood Played

Part Two
I do, ladies. I do. I ave a go.

So many people have helped me bring this book to life that I hardly know where to start and where to stop. So let me just say this: that without the fervent encouragement of my agent, Jonathan Lloyd at Curtis Brown, I never would have finished it, so difficult did I find certain sections to write.

But support me he did, and I was at last able to put together a working draft, and then, to my delight, Atlantic Books and my old friend and colleague Will Atkinson took up the contract. Then Will and his team immediately gave me a superb insight as to how the whole narrative arc of my life, from childhood through to my old age, could be presented in a manner that I think I was before too reticent and too guarded to attempt.

I am delighted I listened. Will and his ace editor James Nightingale led the way, then the ace Alison Tulett joined the team in support, and the whole manuscript opened up.

I cannot thank too warmly those old Waterstones friends and colleagues of mine, such as Paul Baggaley, David McRedmond, John Mitchinson, Martin Latham, Peter French and Kate Gunning, who gave astonishingly generous time to sit down at their laptops and reminisce for us about their Waterstones days, which added so much to that part of the book.

Thank you to them. Thank you to everyone. I have been very fortunate indeed.

Required: Experienced Booksellers for a new bookshop Waterstones in Old Brompton Road. Opening in September. The first of many. Our object is to have the best literary bookshops in the land, staffed by the best, happiest, literary booksellers.

T his was the advertisement I ran in Londons Evening Standard in July 1982, eight weeks before our very first Waterstones store was due to open in South Kensington.

Its an odd advertisement, looking at it now. It was certainly unorthodox, particularly the happiest bit, although the sentiment behind that objective was entirely sincere. But perhaps its very oddness added a positive, intriguing quality to it. Whatever the case, through it I recruited in one fell swoop my first four Waterstones staff members, all of them from Hatchards in Piccadilly (then owned by the publishers William Collins, but safely these days within the Waterstones family).

Hatchards was at that time, and perhaps still is, the most prestigious literary bookshop in Britain, but it was not one whose owners spent too much time worrying about their staffs happiness. Those four recruits came to me because they had not been given a salary increase for three years, which was unbelievably harsh for the time, with annual inflation running so persistently high. How lucky I was.

The telephone rang barely a minute after we had opened on our first day, and Dane Howell, one of these marvellous people, picked up the receiver.

Waterstones? he purred into it.

Ye Gods, I thought. He has just said Waterstones. Waterstones. Ive done it. Its real. Ive made it. That thought was more than a little premature, given the bumps and terrors that occurred on the long and exhilarating road that lay ahead of us. But at that moment, at the very start of the journey, I felt an immense sense of achievement. From day one, every member of staff knew what I wanted Waterstones to do and to be, and they and all the many thousands of staff who followed them over the years set happily about doing it with me. And together as a team as a family we did it.

I quote, immodestly I know, but there we go, from an article in the Independent, written in early October 1992, ten years later almost to the day. I do so because what the article describes was exactly, exactly, point by point, what we had all set out to do, and then did. I had never met or spoken to the journalist, and well its good to read all that from anothers pen. One takes enough brickbats in life

Here it comes again, the annual kerfuffle of the Booker prize. Amid Tuesday nights celebrations and acrimony and recriminations one man will be watching the proceedings with wry disinterest, secure that he has won again, as indeed he has done for the past 10 years.

Neither author, agent nor publisher, the real victor will be a retailer, a businessman. In the decade since the Booker was first televised, Tim Waterstone, 53, founder of 86 bookstores, has done more than anyone to transform literary Britain.

It would be difficult to overstate Mr Waterstones impact on the book trade, and publishers tumble over each other in tribute: he has changed the rules, moved the goalposts, revolutionised the industry. He has made book-buying a pleasurable experience, not an obstacle course. He has made high culture stylish. His shops have proved a godsend to publishers specialising in literary fiction the Fabers, the Seckers, the Picadors. He staffed them with postgrads who had read a volume or two and were more than likely to be writers themselves. He set in motion an Eighties publishing revolution that inspired many other stores to revamp Dillons, Hatchards, Books Etc and with the boom in authors advances and the emergence of the writer as talk-show star, he somehow made the whole business rather rock n roll.

Before Mr Waterstone opened his first shop in Old Brompton Road in 1982, you could go into Foyles and be anaesthetised by inefficiency, stunned by confusion; it made the local library look snazzy. Or you could go into WH Smith and find little but bestsellers and gift books. In most cities outside London you couldnt find philosophy or art or science, because if it didnt sell by the dump-bin, it wasnt stocked. Such classics as there were, invariably dusty Penguins, were consigned to a dark outpost beyond Cookery.