The Bookshop Podcast
The Bookshop Podcast
From Teacher to Bookshop Owner: Lizzie Moss's Journey and The Magic of Literature
What drives someone to leave behind the familiar comforts of a stable career and leap into the unknown waters of entrepreneurship? Join us as we uncover the inspiring journey of Lizzie Moss, the heart and soul behind Heron Books in Bristol, UK. From teaching classics and working at Waterstones, Lizzie's story is one of resilience and passion, culminating in establishing her dream bookshop amidst the charming Clifton Arcade. Listen to her recount the hurdles and triumphs of launching a business during economically turbulent times and the vibrant, supportive community that makes Bristol a haven for indie bookshops.
Heron Books
Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
Omnivore Books Episode on The Bookshop Podcast
The Heart in Winter, Kevin Barry
For our Australian Listeners: yourbookstore.io
Hi, my name is Mandy Jackson-Beverly and I'm a bibliophile. Welcome to the Bookshop Podcast. Each week, I present interviews with authors, independent bookshop owners and booksellers from around the globe and publishing professionals. To help the show reach more people, please share episodes with friends and family and on social media, and remember to subscribe and leave a review wherever you listen to this podcast. For listeners in Australia wanting to purchase books recommended in this episode, go to yourbookstoreio and search for the book in the search bar. You can either purchase the book online or your bookstoreio will tell you which indie bookshop closest to you has the book in stock. When you purchase through yourbookstoreio, 100% of the sale goes to your favorite indie bookshop. You're listening to episode 264.
Speaker 1:Heron Books is located in the historic Clifton Arcade on Boyces Avenue in Bristol, uk, and is owned by Lizzie Moss. The shop carries fiction, nonfiction and children's books. Carries fiction, nonfiction and children's books 4,000 of them in a carefully planned, cozy space. Heron Books offers personal recommendations and the creation of bespoke gift lists for special occasions. The bookshop runs events, including a monthly poetry series and several book groups. Hi, lizzie, and welcome to the show. It's great to have you here.
Speaker 2:Hi, thanks so much for having me my pleasure.
Speaker 1:Now let's begin with learning about you, your work at Waterstones teaching the classics, and what led you to open an indie bookshop in Bristol, sure.
Speaker 2:I feel like I've done maybe every job there is, or a lot of them anyway. I've done loads of different admin jobs for universities, or a lot of them anyway. I've done loads of different admin jobs for universities. I taught classics for a couple of years, I worked in academic publishing for a little bit and then I worked for Waterstones, so I feel like it's been a huge range, but they've all been book adjacent or perhaps all leading here, and what was, I suppose, a bit of a dream has somehow become a reality, not totally sure how.
Speaker 1:Oh, I love hearing about dreams coming true. Now one question Did you move from elsewhere to Bristol specifically to open up the shop?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I grew up in London, went to university in Cambridge and worked there after finishing university and that's where I taught classics after finishing university and that's where I taught classics. Um, so classics in my world meaning Latin and Greek, not as some people say, do you mean like Jane Austen, or do you mean classical music or what are you talking about. And I left teaching, um, absolutely loved teaching, but was kind of overwhelmed by, you know, 100 hour weeks type thing. Um and um walked into Waterstones in Cambridge, uh, which is a gorgeous four-floored shop, uh, so huge big academic section, but big, just a huge, gorgeous shop really. Uh, and was incredibly lucky uh to talk to the right person at the right time and get a job there and then worked up to managing it with two other managers who are great friends and it was just an incredible experience. But then I moved to Bristol for various reasons and thought I'd left the book selling world behind. But I guess I hadn't.
Speaker 1:Was there a particular moment that pushed you forward to follow your dream of opening Heron Books, and did you experience any fear of starting your own business?
Speaker 2:Yes, I can't imagine anyone who starts their own business who isn't like at least a little bit afraid. When I first moved to Bristol, there weren't that many independent bookshops here, and I moved to an area called Bedminster, which is the south of Bristol, and looked around and thought this street has loads of people who want to support independence. Um, you know, really good community, this needs a bookshop, and kind of started researching it and then discovered that there was a bookshop due to open in about six weeks time. Uh, so this area was off but, um, the bookshop that has it open there is called Story Smith and is absolutely gorgeous. So that's exciting.
Speaker 2:And since then there's been this wonderful, I guess, kind of flurry of bookshops opening in Bristol, of indies returning, and Bristol is a city with it's really just lots of tiny villages, um, that make up a city, so everywhere has its own identity. And I started to look more and more at this area called Clifton or Clifton Village and think this could have an independent bookshop. It has a Waterstones, but I think it could also support an independent bookshop. And it was still kind of, um, still kind of a pipe dream. And then one day I discovered that the Victorian arcade. The shopping arcade there had a unit coming up and they don't lock you down for sort of five or ten year contracts, you can just try for a year. So a lot of businesses get started there and it's tiny. Each unit is four and a half meters by four meters. It's little, minuscule spaces, but I just thought I'm gonna do it.
Speaker 2:So a mixture of confidence, luck, family and friends, support, uh, and just right moment, right time and I think certainly it's like slight madness um led me to that moment, uh, and I just went for it. In terms of fears, though, I mean Liz Truss was the Prime Minister at the time and I don't know how much you follow British politics, but pretty disastrous, very short-term Prime Minister looked like a recession was going to hit and hit quite hard. There's a housing crisis, a mortgage crisis happening. The idea that that would be the moment to try setting up a business, uh wild, but I kind of went with. Yeah, everything else had fallen into place, let's try it and if it can work, imagine what it could be like in times when times are good?
Speaker 1:Yes, absolutely, and quite a few indie bookshop owners who opened their bookshops either right before or during COVID have said the same thing, and I've had StorySmith books on the show. They are such sweet people.
Speaker 2:Yeah, they're the best.
Speaker 1:Yeah, one of the things you touched on that actually led me to want to support indie bookshops is the camaraderie between each independent bookshop and the booksellers. I've not seen anything like this in other indie stores before. If one independent bookshop doesn't have a book in stock, they'll call another one just down the street and they will say, yes, we've got it, and vice versa. So there's that support within the bookshop community that I really love and admire. While I live in kind of the country, in a small town in California, I love going to big cities. I just love the diversity, the cosmopolitan feel. Big cities always inspire me. There's so much going on and, with this in mind, when I was researching Bristol, I went to the bristolgovuk website and read that Bristol is a diverse community with citizens representing 187 countries and 91 languages. So, knowing that there is this fabulous diverse community, how does this affect the way you curate the store and does the affordability of books and encouraging children to read come into play?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's a great city for diversity and I think that can only be a benefit when you come to kind of choosing books, because you look for things that could represent all sorts of different stories and different people and that kind of thing. Um, we have a customer who's been reading a book from every country, so, uh, that has kind of spurred me to do research into places that, to be honest, I didn't even know. I'm not sure my geography is great. I didn't know were countries. So that's been really fun. But, yeah, we have a huge diversity of people.
Speaker 2:In terms of children, though, I think trying to encourage children to read and make sure that books are available to them is is really important. We have a big children's, big's, big children's section within the context of a very small shop, but we take part in kind of big events like World Book Day, which is a national thing here for encouraging children to read, and as part of Independent Bookshop Week, last week we did a drive which was organised by the Small City Bookshop, one of our fellow indies. So, again, indies coming together to do stuff where we're getting book donations of secondhand pre-loved children's books and then getting those out to children who can't afford books because it's obviously, you know, sometimes you can tell that a child kind of drags their parent in and is really excited about books and the parent does not have the funds to be just buying them something, especially if it's something that they maybe are going to read once and kind of you know, need to. It's got to be. If they're going to buy them something, it's got to be something that they want to read again and again and again.
Speaker 2:Um, we try and work with the libraries as well. Um, so there's a lovely little local library, the clifton library, um just down the road from us, and we try to kind of work with them to support what they're doing. Uh, sometimes people come in and they're like oh, I'm really sorry, I went to the library, so come to you and I'm like no no we love
Speaker 2:libraries like please go to the library, please use it. It's an incredibly important um resource and place for the community. There's no kind of uh butting up between shops and libraries. And then in terms of working with schools, sometimes I think school libraries assume that it's just going to be cheaper for them to stock from Amazon, and it's actually just not so. Not only is it better to stock from independent bookshops, which will choose kind of individually titles. They really really know their stuff. They know what's right for children of certain ages. They know books that will encourage reluctant readers, books for children with autism or other neurodiverse things. They know, you know all that kind of thing. But also we can probably do a better deal actually, because Amazon well, it just doesn't. Yeah, we can often do something better price-wise as well to make sure that those school libraries are stocked with suitable things for children. So it's something I think all the Indies are really passionate about.
Speaker 1:Yes, they are Now. While we're on the subject of Bristol, if I had a few days there, which museums, historical sites, hiking trails and vegan and vegetarian restaurants do you suggest I visit?
Speaker 2:Well, I'm in serious danger in Clifton because I can. I'm only meters from multiple really good vegan cafes, so, um, it's very easy to run out and get a vegan hot chocolate from anywhere, which is my um much needed drink of choice. By about about three o'clock in the afternoon, um, I'm out to East Village Cafe is around the corner and Eden Cafe. They're both vegan cafes that are amazing and make um. Like Eden Village, eden Cafe does a um a full vegan afternoon tea, which is amazing. So if you're ever here oh, that sounds right up my alley yeah, yeah, you've got to hit that um. And then, inevitably, if you're in Clifton, you have to go to the suspension bridge, of course, um, our gorgeous bridge. But then when you cross over that, you're into an area called Lee Woods which is absolutely beautiful for hiking through, uh, for foraging. There's a big foraging thing happening in Bristol at the moment. Everyone is buying books on mushrooms and heading out to Leewards. They're braver than I am. I'll happily pick some blackberries, but mushrooms Potentially nerve-wracking.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you've really got to know what you're doing if you're picking wild mushrooms to eat For sure, but then if you head in the opposite direction from the bridge, you're heading into the centre, you're heading towards the RWA, the Royal West Academy, which is a beautiful art gallery, and then down, kind of down into the south of the city, there is a really cool gallery called Spike Island, which is like a kind of artist collective. They have amazing exhibitions, but they also have like artist studios that are actually like quite affordable for artists to work in. So I mean, there's not a lot of affordable spaces for artists to make their work and I think Spike Island does really cool stuff. Yeah, those are some of my favourite places, I think.
Speaker 1:Lizzie, do you live?
Speaker 2:right in the city. I'm in the south, so I'm actually literally around the corner from where StorySmith is, which is lovely, and so I walk up to the shop each day. It's like just over half an hour, but it's up a super steep hill. So I moved here from Cambridge, which is pretty much completely flat, where everyone cycles everywhere, including, like if you're going on a night out, you arrive by bike, and the first time I went out with people I met in Bristol, I arrived by bike. Then they were like what are you doing? Like stop it, that's not how we do things. Um, but yeah, there's some quite steep hills, but I it's really nice, I think I feel like I walk up to the shop each day. Get my, get my calf muscles sorted, yeah, oh, I'm with you.
Speaker 1:I love being able to exercise, you know, before you go to work. My commute is just from one room to the other, so I don't really get my muscles going, but I do like to work out before I start. Under the About section on the Heron Books website is a piece you wrote about where reading has taken you thanks to a few of your favorite authors. Your phrase quote I am yet to live in Berlin, or at sea, or in a castle. One forgets when reading how badly one feels. The cold end quote Just gorgeous. What I love about what you wrote is that it shows how stories can draw us in and take us to places that in real life we may never get to visit. Do you remember what age this idea first hit you?
Speaker 2:I tried to think about this and I don't know if it's something that hit me at a specific moment or that kind of has dawned on me over time. I was thinking about how you can read the same thing and be taken to a different place each time. I was thinking about how I reread Brideshead Revisited a lot. It's one of my favourite books, but I think each time I read it I'm experiencing a different kind of nostalgia or something and I'm drawn to different places within the book. So I don't know if I could say it was at one time, but books are indeed transportative.
Speaker 2:I just read a book called Cold Kitchen by Caroline Eden, which is a food writing book about how recipes take you to different places. It's extraordinary. She takes you like on the Trans-Siberian Express and all over Eastern Europe, but she's writing it all from her freezing cold kitchen in a basement in Edinburgh, largely during COVID, and she's cooking these things that she has experienced in these other countries and you can smell them with her and you are both in the kitchen where she's cooking them and somewhere in the middle of Ukraine, for example. So I think it's something I realize again and again and I'm actually I'm struck by it and amazed by it again, and again.
Speaker 1:I've been jotting down notes while listening to you speak, because your words reminded me of a conversation I had recently with Celia Sack, owner of Omnivore Books in San Francisco. Celia and I chatted about regional cooking and how this idea has expanded over the decades along with regional cookbooks. I ordered a book from Omnivore Books titled Praise Song for the Kitchen Ghosts Stories and Recipes from Five Generations of Black Country Cooks by Crystal Wilkinson, and this cookbook, or cookery book, is written in the style of creative nonfiction, so that there are stories among the recipes. So, yes, I think books take us away to other places, other worlds, and they do this without a screen to prompt us. So we have an emotive connection to books and stories that is unlike other mediums of entertainment.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I've just read Background for Love by Helen Wolfe. She was a publisher. She published people like Kurt Vonnegut. She was just quietly wrote this gorgeous novel, never tried to do anything with it, didn't, you know, wanted it kind of burnt after she died, that kind of a thing, and thank goodness her wishes were not, were not followed. It's been translated recently by her grandson. It's the story of a woman and a man who are not yet in a relationship, leaving 1930s Berlin and going to south of France for a summer and it is all that kind of thing like the place is absolutely kind of central to the story, uh, and feels kind of alive in the story and you can feel the heat, even though I was reading it. It's actually kind of warm here today, which it rarely is, but I was reading it when it was cold and raining and I was in Saint-Tropez very happily. But it's such a special thing and I agree I think a film or something which you absorb passively just doesn't do the same thing.
Speaker 1:No, it doesn't. Can you tell us about a few local authors living in the Bristol area?
Speaker 2:Oh, we have so many, so I'm just gonna have to apologize in advance for all the people who I don't mention. But one of the things I love and I didn't know this is very shameful, but I didn't know about a lot of it when I opened the shop is there is a thriving poetry scene, an absolutely wonderful poetry scene, and one of the people who came into the shop early on, bob Walton, is a brilliant local poet. He has two collections, a third on the way, hopefully next year, and he is also like a poet wrangler, like he just brings this whole community together. He's absolutely extraordinary, extraordinary. He's become like a best friend and, um, I'm so moved by the poetry that's happening here. There's a brilliant poet who's actually from she's from normal, uh, illinois, but she teaches here at Bristol, called Carrie Etta, um, who we've been lucky enough to have read in the shop, uh, and this year she's going to do our Christmas party poetry night, so we do a monthly poetry, um, kind of reading, and I'm really year she's going to do our Christmas party poetry night, so we do a monthly poetry, um, kind of reading, and I'm really excited there's going to be her this year. But, yeah, loads and loads of just incredible local poets, a lot of them. There's a big community of people who've moved here from Wales who all seem to be this. It feels like poetry and lyricism and music kind of all plays in together, so that's very exciting.
Speaker 2:There's some gorgeous nature writers, particularly Noreen Massoud, who was shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction. She wrote a wonderful book called A Flat Place which is about her love of flat places but also about her complex PTSD and how those two kind of interplay. So really fascinating mixture of kind of nature and memoir. And Michael Millay, as well as a wonderful nature writer, he has written this book called Late Light. He moved here from Indonesia and Australia and didn't have the same kind of nature references as people. So for example, if I see a magpie I would say good morning, mr Magpie. And I think he, you know, came here and found these things and was like what's going on? I don't have these same reference points.
Speaker 2:But the book becomes an exploration of four uncharismatic species. So he looks at things like mussels and eels, uncharismatic species. So he looks at things like mussels and eels, things that I don't particularly want to go that near but through his writing, very happy to go near them, uh, and absolutely fascinated by them. So, but there's there's an incredible. There's food writers again. There's Jenny Chandler and Fiona Beckett. They're two local food writers who are just gorgeous and, like everyone's, all the local writers are so supportive of the shop. It's an incredible, incredible community. Really. I feel very lucky.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and they're also lucky to have you in their community. What are you currently?
Speaker 2:reading. I often have a few things on the go. I am reading A Heart in Winter by Kevin Barry, which is just such fun. It's a Western, but with Irish characters. The dialogue is electric. Every sentence feels like you want to write it down and hold on to it. Even the profanity is just perfect, absolutely spot on. Everyone you can picture. You just know what shoes they're wearing and there's something about that that makes you you know, you really know what they're like, um, so I'm having excellent fun with that.
Speaker 2:And then we've got we've had a couple of book groups this week, so we run a lot of book groups, um, but we had a fiction one where we read Burnham Wood by Eleanor Catton. So I've had that on the brain a lot. And then that's led me back to looking at Macbeth and trying to figure out where she's pulling in Macbeth references, which has been very, very fun. So, yeah, I tend to have at least some fiction and some nonfiction on the go at once, because you want to have different things for different moods and very much fiction in the evenings nonfiction on a Sunday afternoon, I like to start the day with some poetry.
Speaker 1:Reading poetry in the morning is a wonderful tonic. Let's take you back to when you were studying the classics. Did you have a favorite?
Speaker 2:I loved reading Ovid so I loved the metamorphoses in particular, all those kind of myths that you think you know from from childhood. You get different versions with him. You get a lot of just fascinating new versions you get. You can see how someone can toy with mythology, I think in the metamorphosis morphoses I should say I read a lot of hellenistic philosophy as well. So stoicism, um, in particular, um, I'm not sure I'm living the stoic life, but that's okay, probably slightly more, um, slightly more hedonistic than that myself, um, but obviously in terms of classics it's, it's reaching a whole new audience now with this kind of absolute explosion of people writing classical mythology kind of retakes.
Speaker 2:Natalie Haynes in particular, I think, is absolutely excellent. Her book Stoneblind, her retelling of Medusa, is brilliant. The Pat Barker books are great, but I mean it's just. It's just. It's got a world of its own now. It's very exciting and the Emily Wilson translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey have been fantastic, I think, and generated a lot of conversation even in a tiny shop. The idea that you can stock essentially an academic huge tome of the Iliad. That's very exciting to me that people want to come in and chat about that and buy it.
Speaker 1:Oh, I'm sure your customers love the fact that you can give them great suggestions because of your knowledge of the classics.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, and there's lots of children's versions as well that are such fun.
Speaker 1:I'm so glad you brought that up, lizzie. When my sons were little, they could not get enough of books on mythology, and what was wonderful about this is that later on they realized where other stories derived, because, as you know, the myths and legends that's where the basis of all stories come from. People often ask what kind of books I gave my children to read. Well, for a start, my husband and I have a huge library and we both have quite different tastes when it comes to reading. But we left a lot of nonfiction books around the house, children's versions of mythology and legends, and they couldn't get enough of it. This is where their thirst for knowledge came from. So, yeah, I always say to people go to yard sales, pick up books about the universe, pick up books on trains, insects, mountains, any kind of animals, and just leave them around the house, because they're the books the children will look at and later they'll start reading. I think that's the secret about getting children interested in reading.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I was so lucky as well to grow up somewhere like that, where there was just stuff, you know, there were things you could pull off the shelves and yeah, it's so important to just be able to indulge.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you remind me of one time I was working and I remember I called my husband and I said what are you doing with the kids today? And he said, oh, we got on a train and we went downtown LA and we're just walking around looking at all the different people, the murals on the walls, and for them it was such an adventure, but it lit a little light in them too about how things are connected and the world around us. We took our kids to the art museums all over Los Angeles, to concerts in the park, to music venues.
Speaker 2:Bristol's got a great street art scene, as you may know as well. So it is, you know, you can just walk around. You don't need to pay money to go somewhere. You can walk around and kind of, yeah, enjoy art and think about what is creativity. Is it doing some graffiti on the side of a building? Well, sometimes yes.
Speaker 1:Yes, I agree with you, lizzie. It's been great chatting with you. I think Bristol is super lucky to have you and Heron Books in their city, and I wish you all the best.
Speaker 2:Thank you, Mandy. Thanks so much. Hope you come to Bristol at some stage.
Speaker 1:Me too, I'd love to explore the city.
Speaker 2:Lovely and you Thanks so much.
Speaker 1:You've been listening to my conversation with Lizzie Moss, owner of Heron Books in Bristol, uk. To help the show reach more people, please share episodes with friends and family and on social media and remember to subscribe and leave a review wherever you listen to this podcast. To find out more about the Bookshop Podcast, go to thebookshoppodcastcom and make sure to subscribe and leave a review wherever you listen to the show. You can also follow me at Mandy Jackson Beverly on X, instagram and Facebook and on YouTube at the Bookshop Podcast. If you have a favorite indie bookshop that you'd like to suggest we have on the podcast, I'd love to hear from you via the contact form at thebookshoppodcastcom. The Bookshop Podcast is written and produced by me, mandy Jackson-Beverly, theme music provided by Brian Beverly, executive assistant to Mandy, adrian Otterhan, and graphic design by Francis Barala. Thanks for listening and I'll see you next time.