I’m coming to the end of a visit to the UK – I’ve been visiting family in Leeds and Stockton. I’ll be flying back to Brisbane, Australia tomorrow and it’s likely to be several years before I come back – though you never know. One of the things that the UK does much better than Australia is big bookshops. The biggest bookshop in Brisbane is Dymocks which is one floor shop, stuffed in a basement. It’s pretty good. The biggest bookshop in Leeds is Waterstones and it sprawls over three floors. It’s triple the size of Brisbane’s biggest, if not more, and there are many other bookshops in the UK that are much bigger.
I could browse around Waterstones for hours. I love it there, although It does have an oddity – there is no romance. There is shelf after shelve for general fiction, and specific sections for crime, science fiction and horror. There are also sections for graphic novels, classics and poetry, and acres of room for various types of non-fiction, which take up most of the upper floors. What is lacking is any section for romance.
Romance is the biggest selling genre of books by quite some margin, selling twice as much as its nearest competitor, crime and mystery. So it’s extremely odd that it wasn’t there. It could be that romance was just interspersed with general fiction; I did find Sally Rooney lurking in there. It could be that there is some kind of cringe factor, but Waterstones is in the business of selling books, and romance sells, so I’d be surprised if it was that. It could be that I missed it; I’m awful at finding things. It would be good going, even for me, to miss an entire genre of books; in a bookshop, after looking around for it, twice.
So, if anyone does find the romance section in Waterstones, Leeds then let me know. I’m genuinely interested to know where they’ve hidden it.
