Just after lunch a well spoken teenage girl rushed excitedly to the counter and said, ‘This bookshop is amazing, I’ve just bumped into my best friend’s cousin here. She lives in Dundee and we live in Newcastle.’ There really does seem to be a serendipity about bookshops, not just with finding books you never knew existed, or that you’ve been searching for for years, but with people too. Often customers—not locals—will bump into people they know from a totally different walk of life in the shop. I’ve overheard dozens of conversations along these lines.
