LONG READ: Award nomination is the latest chapter for Kingussie indie bookshop
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Claire Candy the owner of Kingussie’s Minerva’s Emporium, learned this past week she had become one of eight Scottish finalists in the British Book Award independent bookshop category.
Claire laughed: “It was just a little email in our inbox.
“I wrote on our Instagram ‘Someone come in an hour and check that I’ve got up off the floor’.
But maybe the fact the bookshop is one of the Scottish finalists – a first-timer along with Ullapool Bookshop – in publishing magazine The Bookseller’s awards is less surprising when you hear the story of the arrival of Minerva’s Emporium on the town’s High Street.
“It’s a long and winding story – no, not really!” Claire said.
But she was right first time.
The shop is also a wool shop and deciding what the town of Kingussie needed and wanted to add to its High Street took Claire some trial and error.
Claire explained: “It has always been a thing for me that we are in a small town, Kingussie is a small place.
“It has gone through a period – as many small places have – of a lot of people going ‘The High Street’s dying, there’s nothing here’.
"And that really wound a lot of us up. I spent a lot of 2018/2019 trying to find out ‘Well, what is it you want?’.
"Let’s find something you can support, and I’ll put it in, so I had a shop on the High Street in 2019 which was a sort of an experiment in that I just rented an empty premises and opened a shop.
“I had no plan of what it was going to be. I just opened it, started out [stocking it] in £100 increments and changed with the wind depending on the level of support I got for one thing or another. I tested the water.
“As long as I had enough to open the door every day, and to turn the lights on, I wasn’t worried about making a profit.
"The point was to put something in front of the locals that they would say ‘Yes, this is great! That’s the thing we need’.
“That year we were a vape shop at one point, a gift shop and by the Christmas of 2019 we had arts and crafts that I was importing from Edinburgh, just to give the locals something else to see.
"When you are in the Cairngorm National Park, a lot of it is based on tourism.
"When I started the shop people would say ‘Oh, you are a gift shop. Then you have to have Harris tweed and shortbread!’ and I went ‘Why? Everybody’s got that?’ and they would say ‘Well that’s what sells!’.
And I would say ‘But the locals don’t want that! I live here – I don’t want something that says Welcome To Scotland on it? – I want something as well!’.
“I had just about got that off the ground – we had some gift books, cards, typical boutique, indie shop things. Then lockdown came in March 2020 and I closed that shop, emptied it in a day and moved into a section of a warehouse that had a mail order business in it.
“Then I converted that into a shoppable space in lockdown. I thought there are two things you can do in lockdown, you can sit and wait it out or you can use it as time you wouldn’t otherwise have had.
“So I converted the space and opened it as a shop at Christmas 2020 so that people would have somewhere to shop for Christmas.
“And what I noticed was that I had ordered in some of the Penguin clothbound classic editions – they are really pretty books – and people went nuts for them. They were so excited that you could buy a new book in Kingussie.
“It already has an excellent second-hand bookshop that has run for years, but you can’t get new books anywhere, really, and there is space for both. I thought ‘Okay, they want a bookshop!’.
“I literally Googled ‘How do you become a bookshop?’!”
By April 2021, Claire had found an empty solicitor’s office on the High Street, moved in and 'ripped the place apart'.
“In two months I completely refurbished and re-purposed it and it’s now the bookshop and wool shop and it’s great because it has opened a premises on the High Street that pretty much otherwise would have turned into a house, which happens in a lot of places, and that is the death of a High Street.
“Once a building becomes residential it never gets turned back and if you lose too many of your commercial premises, then it’s too far gone.
“We’ve only got 12 businesses on Kingussie High Street, but apart from the Co-op, they are all independent. We all support each other and we are all quite close and we try very hard to push the footfall up the road.
"I work very closely with the tea shop and the post office, they recommend people to me I send people up to them, we all cooperate with each other – that’s important.”
Claire has also endeavoured to be as inclusive as possible with the shop.
“I have always been a strong supporter of the LGBTQIA+ community and representation in general, it’s just I’m an intersectional feminist [taking account of many ways each woman can experience discrimination] and I’m a bit of an activist.
"I was always going to stock a section of queer books, what I hadn’t realised was how lacking that is in this area, until people were coming in going ‘Oh my God, you’ve got that!’.
“The bit that stuck out for me early on was a customer came in – they weren’t very old – and they bought two non-binary books and an ACE book [with asexual characters]from me.
"They said to me they had spent all day in Inverness but hadn’t found a single thing, then had stopped for coffee in Kingussie on the way back and were leaving with three books!
“Because Kingussie has the high school for the area – pupils from Aviemore and the whole of Badenoch are in Kingussie – I felt it was important to make sure we had representation, so I have built on what I would have instinctively had anyway.
“We are now also a registered safe space for the LGBTQIA+ community.
"We are what is called a rainbow spot which is an initiative in partnership with Stonewall. You sign up and register as a rainbow safe space. We have a giant trans progress pride flag hanging outside the shop at all times.
“And I carry a large representation of books not just for the LGBTQIA+ community, I also usually try and make sure I have things for black voices and indigenous voices as well throughout the catalogue that I carry, including the children’s books.
"I also do same sex marriage and engagement and non-gendered cards as well as the standard greetings cards as well because I think these are things you shouldn’t have to try and find specifically, they should be in with everything else.
“We try and do as much advocacy as we can within the community and a lot of people talk to me about how that is something that needs to be visible in this area.
“And I work quite closely with Somewhere For Us which is the LGBTQIA+ cultural and heritage journal, published four times a year and it’s all Scotland.
“I was in it, along with the new Doctor Who,” Claire laughed. "I was given their UNICORN award. They choose 25 people each year because of their work in LGBTQIA+ advocacy in Scotland."
Claire adds quirky touches to the life of the shop – the children’s bookshop is entered through a wardrobe. And the recent food and film festival saw the screening of a Japanese film served in the shop with green tea cocktails and home-made Japanese sweets.
“Everything in my bookshop I have consciously put there,” Claire explained.
“I don’t stock with an algorithm, your 500 top bestsellers. I very much don’t do that. I work on instinct and I don’t always stock the things you would think I would stock. I talk a lot to my customers and then I quite often pick things that I know people will like.
“My books are there because I can see a reason to have them, not because they will sell – which is probably not the greatest business strategy in the world!
“But I think that is one of the best points of an independent bookshop.
“If you lined up 10 independent bookshops next to each other on a street, they would all have a completely different catalogue. And that is the power of an indie bookshop because it is the person’s curated choice.
“Every one you go into is going to have a slightly different selection of books and that is what they are there for I think!”
The award nomination has clearly meant a lot to the owner of Minerva’s Emporium.
Claire laughed: “I don’t know if you have ever been to the Centre of Scotland stone that is not far from here, up on the mountain? It’s between Dalwhinnie and Newtonmore – and it’s not the centre of Scotland, it’s one of about four around the country.
“But I do lovingly joke that I live just to the left of the middle of nowhere!”
Claire has found being nominated for the book award, sponsored by book wholesaler Gardners, has made her think about where it all began for her.
“This is the first time I’ve actually sat down and ingested all this myself. And there is a wonderful full circle moment about it, in that the thing that really pushed me to open the bookshop was that I saw a map somebody had done on Twitter.
“They had mapped every independent bookshop as far as they were aware of in the British Isles. You zoomed into our area and we were in the middle of a big hole between Grantown and Fort William.
“I thought, ‘You know what, I’m so fed up of living in a big hole!’, so I have put a pin in the middle!
“It is so nice now that my pin has been seen by The Bookseller’s awards.”
Winners of the independent bookshop of the year award will be announced on Thursday, March 16. The overall winner will be revealed during The British Book Awards ceremony at Grosvenor House London on Monday, May 2023. Follow Claire and Minerva's Emporium on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and TikTok: @amongthebookshelves
Link for the shop: https://www.locaji.co.uk/scotland/kingussie/minervas-emporium/383072/
