Where Do You Go? with Peter Willis from BOOKS
The secondhand book and zine seller tells us about his favourite London spots
Every now and again we like to ask people for their personal take on London. We get them to tell us the places in the city that they turn to for different reasons: the spots that excite them, inspire them, make them feel calm, happy or just make them want to spend money. We call it ‘Where do you go?’
For April’s edition of WDYG? we spoke to Pete Willis, the man behind, BOOKS, Peckham’s eclectic and exhaustive collection of printed matter. Peter talked to us about what it’s like keeping a small business alive in these times, the appeal of zines (and basements) and where to find “the best falafel in London”.
Who are you?
I’m Peter, I’m 34, I do lots of stuff but mainly I run BOOKS, a secondhand book and zine shop in Peckham (20 Maxted Road to be exact).
Why should we trust you?
Maybe you shouldn’t! I don’t know if I have any particular insight, but I moved here in 2007 and other than a year in Stoke Newington convincing my partner to move south (it worked), I’ve been in the Camberwell – Peckham – New Cross area ever since.
Can you tell us about how Books came to be - what the initial idea was and how you got set up?
BOOKS has existed in some iteration since 2015, initially as a stall at the Camberwell Sunday Market, then up the alleyway at 125 Rye Lane for three years, and now in the (semi)-legit shop space at Maxted/Oglander Road.
BOOKS was a kind of convergence of different things I’ve been doing for a while. I’ve been involved with zines since I was a teenager and ran a zine distro called Dead Trees and Dye since 2004, doing mail-order and organising zine fairs, etc. I also co-ran a small press and riso printer called Studio Operative with Alice Lindsay, and was working in gallery bookshops for money.
Initially it was an opportunity to sell some of my own books I was happy to pass on, and the zines I was distroing, as well as some of our own publications and those of friends etc. Since then, it’s just carried on growing slowly slowly. When the market stopped, I looked around for spaces to continue and eventually landed up the alley, and then once things got too wet and cold being outside all the time I moved into the shop.
How hard has it been to keep Books alive? How tough was lockdown and how difficult was it changing locations?
I’m in a good position in that I don’t rely on the shop to subsidise me – I’ve always worked somewhere else which pays my rent and the shop covers itself. It makes money but I don’t make money, if that makes sense.
When I was down the alleyway I was still working at other bookshops, so the opening times was based around my rota. Now I’m doing a PhD which is funded, so that means I can be open set days (Thurs – Sun) and work on that the rest of the week.
Lockdown unfortunately hit right when I had left the gallery I was working in but hadn’t yet started the PhD – so I went from working 7 days to having nothing to do and did go a bit nuts. But, thanks to Ali my landlord down the alley and the Books Trade Charity who paid the shop rent for the worst of it, it managed to survive. I did a run of t-shirts to generate some cash, was on universal credit, and did a daily newsletter of recommendations which kept me sane.
The latest move also happened at the worst time but turned out alright. I was planning on being up the alley up until Christmas and then moving over the break between then and the new year – but we had the Christmas lockdown that lasted until April so everything slowed down. In the end it was alright, it just meant I could take it slower, my friend Felix who was helping with the shelving didn’t need to rush, etc – I could be there a few hours a day rather than pushing it all into a week. And I could do more online and mail-order stuff to keep the rent paid.
Basically, there is no money in books, and even less in zines, so if you just accept that it’s much easier. Part of the reason for doing the PhD was it would allow a few years to try to build the shop and see if it was possible to sustain me once I finish. At the minute it looks like no, but if I manage to find somewhere I can do more events, launches, readings, etc that might help, but would mean another move.
Where do you think this zine resurgence has come from? Is it a bit of a kick against ‘digital culture’ or is that oversimplifying it?
I think it is to an extent. It’s hard for me to discern sometimes as I grew up with zines and they’ve always been around so it’s hard to chart the ebbs and flows, but I think there is definitely more happening now than say ten or fifteen years ago.
It’s interesting seeing things shift, whereas once zines were forms of urgent publishing, utilising methods of production that could be used quickly and cheaply, in opposition to traditional publishing methods like books or magazines, it seems like now all print publishing is responding to digital publishing. Now if you want to get something out there urgently and cheaply, you can just put it online or on some form of social media, so I think zines have shifted to a more craft-kind of temporality. Now the choice to make something in print, to spend the time doing it that way, is a slower, more considered approach.
Zines I think are inherently material and that is what’s coming through in this latest peak of zine production.
Give us top three zines that you have in stock right now that everyone should read/.
I always recommend ROT from New York which is my favourite zine of all time, but because I’m always recommending it its always sold out so there’s no point here. If you can get one get one.
I just got in an amazing zine called Suck It, which is by OT, and charts her obsession with nature and fashion and frogs, it’s a mad cut up of moss-dying clothing and rolling around in mud and being naked in the forest and comes with a pack of grass seed. It’s completely deranged and I love it.
Chris Jones series of South London pamphlets are always flying off the shelves, and his latest The Killing of the Elephant and the Destruction of the Castle, about the regeneration of the Elephant is fantastic.
Also Lotte L.S’s prose-poem A town, three cities a fig, a riot… is one of my favourite pieces of writing in years, everything the produce at Red Herring, their press in Great Yarmouth, is worth getting.
That’s 4 but ROT doesn’t count.
Okay, on to the usual questions… Where do you go and always end up spending too much money?
Every time I go to Housmans in Kings Cross I need to have a quick peek in the basement, and always come out with a pile of amazing books I most likely will never read.
The steady stream of radicals donating their books to the £1-3 basement means there’s always something too good to resist, and likely never to appear again. Recent finds include Angolan war novels, Stuart Hall’s copy of McLuhan’s Understanding Media (with annotations), back issues of State Research and a copy of Qaddafi’s Green Book. What more do you need?
Where do you go that can never close down, because if it does you might cry?
OK another basement, but Any Amount of Books (above), particularly the basement, has been a constant in my life for so long I really don’t know what I would do if it closed, possibly never go into central London ever again.
So many other shops on the Charing Cross road, most recently the Quinto basement, have left us now, with Any Amount the last one holding strong (Pordes doesn’t count, too expensive).
It’s not just the memories, running into friends there who are long dead, or the many hundreds of books I’ve picked up over the years, but it feels like the type of secondhand bookshop I grew up with that is slowly disappearing – lots of eclectic stock, cheap prices, always something worth picking up, that rewards the diggers. Much of the ethos of BOOKS is influenced by places like Any Amount, so I’m trying to keep the mantle going.
Where do you go to cheer yourself up?
The fondest memory of my Stoke Newington year was getting a zaatar naan for £1.50 from Baban’s on Blackstock Road on my way to get the train to work.
Nowadays it’s a treat to get up that way so you can do a good little route from Haggerston starting with Burley Fisher (above), up to Oxfam books, coffee at Oto, hit the stationers on Kingsland Road, the charity shops on Stoke Newington High Street, then the ones on Church Street, plus the great Church Street Bookshop, take a breather in Clissold Park, then grab a naan on the way to the station and get the train home.
If you can’t make it up that way then best naan in south is made by my former alley neighbours Asian Takeaway off Rye Lane – I recommend the chickpea and spinach to go with it.
Where do you go that’s withing walking distance of your house?
Falafel & Shawarma on Camberwell Church Street (above) has been a part of my life for the last 15 years (when it was called Taste London, never forget) to the point where I take it for granted.
Very occasionally, particularly if going there with a friend who’s visiting from somewhere else, I realise that the fact the best falafel in London is a two minute walk from my house and costs £3.50, is a miracle that should be treasured, and I take a moment in the Hermits Cave to thank the lord for my good luck.
Where do you go if you want to switch off?
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