If you’ve ever spent an hour ( or 2 or 3 ) browsing in a Waterstones bookstore, you will be fascinated by this book . If you haven’t visited Waterstones, but you enjoy books about bookstores & entrepreneurs, then as well , this book will be a treat.
Tim Waterstone had a dank & lonely childhood, spent in boarding schools in England, where the winters were cold and freezing, the curriculum uninspiring and one headmaster a sexual predator. His father was cold and rebuffed the young boy’s affection, his mother neglectful. The biggest splashes of colour in his early life were visits to the The Book Club, a book store run by a Miss Santoro in his home village of Crowborough. The early part of this memoir is vivid and evocative with details of highs like going to see a cricket match at Lords despite the beginnings of chicken pox and the lows of being actively neglected.
Once Tim Waterstone moves to adulthood, to Cambridge and then to corporate life, there is a shift in tone.
Tim, the boy you knew vanishes – you no longer see him, or his first and then his second wife, or any of his six children.
Instead you see only Waterstones. Of course this is interesting too , moving from the glorious growth years of the book chain to a decade later, to dealings & disagreements with rival bookseller W. H. Smith.
The books ends with a sense of sadness, of frustration and also a sense of resignation as Tim Waterstone moves away from the business he built up – between private equity companies, investors and gross margin fixated businessmen, there seems little space for a book loving bookseller.
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