Please Help

We absolutely love it here at the Big Green Bookshop. These have been the most rewarding 3 years of our working lives and we really don’t want it to end. The decision to open came about when the Waterstone’s we managed in the shopping centre nearby was suddenly closed with little warning. The public outcry at this decision made our minds up. After a lot of effort, a considerable amount of help from some amazing people, our redundancy money and a large loan from the bank for our stock and the building, we finally opened the Big Green Bookshop on March 8^th 2008’

It’s just that we can’t really afford to have another nine months like the nine we just had, and despite all your amazing support we are struggling.

It was always our aim to try and be more than just a shop where you buy books, and since we opened we’ve tried to offer something for everyone:

• Author events including Will Self, Mark Billingham, David Vann, Karen Maitland, Christopher Fowler, Laura Dockrill, Magnus Mills and even Maisy Mouse!
• Musical evenings, film nights and historical walks
• Well over 300 visits so far to the local schools in Haringey, Enfield and Barnet helping them to promote literacy with author visits, talks, storytelling and whatever else we can.
• Monthly knitting groups, quizzes, writers groups and board games days (and we’re about to start a comedy night.)
• Two book groups.
• Weekly storytelling and singing for the under 5’s.
• Supporting local talent by holding book launches, poetry readings and talks by the cream of North London’s literary stars.
• Even a place to leave your shopping if it gets too heavy and to sit down with a free cup of tea or coffee.

The list could go on, but we hope you get the idea.

We sincerely hope that you want The Big Green Bookshop to remain here and value what we do and so we are asking for your help.

Our bank loan now has nine months to go until it’s paid off. This is our biggest single outgoing each month. Once the loan has been paid off we will be in a relatively stable position.

We want to address the short term issues and also the longer term ones, so;

Firstly

As our last newsletter announced, we’d like to set up The Big Green Bookshop Committee which will support the bookshop, offering suggestions & ideas to improve what we do for our customers in the future. The first meeting is this Sunday February 27^th at 11am. Please come along.

Secondly

It’s the 3^rd Anniversary of the Bookshop on March 8^th. During the week 6^th to 12^th March we’re asking you all to buy just one extra book from the Big Green Bookshop. We have over 1,000 people on our loyalty card scheme & many of you who are reading this who aren’t. If each of you bought one extra book this would pretty much guarantee our survival.

For those of you who cannot make it into the bookshop, but want to help, we take orders over the phone or on our website, and we’ve also set up a ‘donate now’ button at the top of this page if you have all the books you need but would still like to help us out.

We have some of the greatest customers in the world and we are constantly humbled by the support you show us.

Thanks for reading this message.

Simon, Tim and Mark