The Bookshop Podcast
The Bookshop Podcast
Kett's Books: A Community's Triumph in Wymondham, UK
The story of Kett's Books reveals how a community rallied to keep a beloved local bookshop in their town. Through the values of collaboration and empathy, the bookshop has become a thriving center for readers and volunteers alike, bridging the gap between literature and community.
• Discussion of the closure of the original local bookshop
• Formation of a community-led initiative to open Ketz Books
• Tracy's background as a story strategist and its relevance to bookselling
• The significance of the name Ketz Books and its historical roots
• Community involvement in curating the bookshop's offerings
• Overview of a typical day at the bookshop with volunteer engagement
• Insights into Wyndham's historical context and attractions
• Recommendations for local visitors on exploring Wyndham's literary scene
The Kings of London, William Shaw
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. You're listening to episode 283.
Speaker 1:What do you do when you discover your local bookshop is closing on Christmas Eve? Well, in this case, strangers got together in a pub in Wyndham, UK, to explore whether a group of volunteers could actually run a bookshop. They agreed that where they lacked experience, they had goodwill and enthusiasm and, as it turned out, quite a lot of determination. In only eight weeks they'd formed the Friends Group and raised funding, formed a company with their name and logo and had the keys to their community bookshop. I'm excited to chat with Tracy Kenney, Managing Director of Ketz Books. Hi, Tracy, and welcome to the show. It's great to have you here. It's really good to be here. Thank you. Here I am beginning my day and it's kind of the end of your workday, so how are you feeling?
Speaker 2:I'm good, Thank you. We kind of get to the end of the day and of course you want to go home, but then you don't want to go home.
Speaker 1:Because it's just great working in a bookshop. Now, before we get into the story of Ket's books.
Speaker 2:I'd like to learn about you and your work as a story strategist. Ah well that. So it was a short time, but it did serve me really well in coming into bookselling. So I had worked in a large company for a very long time, getting an idea about all aspects of the company, and when we needed to communicate something, it was a large financial company. Just telling people this is what you need to know didn't really go down very well, but when we used an anecdote to express why it was important and talked about the human impact, people seemed to relate to it. They saw themselves in the situation. They thought about what they would do faced with the same problem, and so they were really engaged with it. And then when we got to the solution they were in. There was so much more buy-in when you told things like that.
Speaker 2:So toward the end of my time in the big company, they were going through a rebrand. They were changing their name completely, and I had found out about this brand storytelling thing and had spent quite a lot of time researching it. So they took me into the most senior people's offices and asked me to help them form their speeches about why they believed in the change. So they were amused and tolerant. They weren't convinced. And so I sat down with them and I said, yeah, we'll talk about that in a minute. So what do you do at the weekend? And they thought that was a distraction.
Speaker 2:But then they would start telling me stories about, for instance, how they would go out on a kayak with their young children. And I sort of prompted it and I'd say, surely that's dangerous. And they would say, but I know my equipment and I know my limits and I know the route and I know I can handle it and the benefits are worth the risk. And so they were forming their own story about how they were taking the company into a new area. And so when they finished talking I said, well, there's your speech. And they were absolutely flabbergasted. But I did it three times with these senior guys. And then they went to the Barbican, a respected theater in London, and gave a presentation to several hundred people and they just told these stories each of them, and they all got standing ovations. So that kind of work that I went on to do when I left the company, to help people locate the stories that they already had in themselves, to explain the other things that they wanted to convince people of.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, there's nothing quite like the power of storytelling. As I've said many times before on this podcast, I believe that through reading well-written fiction we develop empathy for others and, let's face it, we need more of that these days and I'm guessing the work you did previously as a story strategist helps with book selling and also with building community within your volunteers with building community within your volunteers.
Speaker 2:Well, yes, I mean, I really use it in terms of anticipating the customer experience and because we're a not-for-profit bookshop, we're a social enterprise, I am a bookseller, but I don't have to be the bookseller, so we extend that experience to lots of people who also work in the shop. Who I mean? Who doesn't want to work in a bookshop? So we have lots of really capable, experienced people who are able to talk to the customers, share their life experience and share the stories that they've enjoyed and share that community with them, that they've enjoyed and share that community with them. So I've been able to kind of in real life, offer a new story for those people so they can step into that role of bookseller and have the meaningful experience that we, so many of us, get to enjoy, if that makes sense.
Speaker 1:Yes, it absolutely does. Can you share the history of Ket's Books, where the name derives and how you became involved with the bookshop?
Speaker 2:Okay, so Wyndham has always had a bookshop, as long as any of my oldest customers can remember. I keep asking them. And in 2013, the previous bookshop was going to close on Christmas Eve and never open again. And so my colleague, Ray Rumsby, knew about community businesses and he said this is a town that needs to have a bookshop. So he and I called a meeting in a pub and a load of strangers got together and we all said we can run a bookshop, it can't be that difficult. And so we then spent the next 11 years figuring out how difficult it is. And so, from when we met in the pub as a group of strangers in the middle of September 2013, we had formed a company registered at Companies House, we had our funding, we had our branding, we had the keys to the business by the 1st of February Wow, that's organization and dedication.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So it was a whirlwind and we had all these volunteers who were willing to come in and learn to run a bookshop with us. Everyone brought different skills or experience or enthusiasm. We have lots of volunteers who actually don't work in the shop but they bring other skills that they're on hand behind the scenes. So we needed a name for the shop, and one of those behind the scenes volunteers did a workshop with us, kind of to identify our brand where we were going to sit on several continuums, like are we going to be really stuffy or are we going to be really relaxed, and those sorts of lines. So he knew what our name was going to be, where we were going, but he helped us to to come up with that we needed to be called Kett's books, because Robert Kett is the most famous son of Wyndham.
Speaker 2:In 1549, the government, which was led at the time by Edward VI, decided to enclose the common lands where people were grazing their sheep and were farming, and this meant that they didn't have access to food. So that was the law. The fences went up and it was a really big problem. So the local farmers went to a landowner someone who was of a better class and explained the situation, and that was Robert Kett, and he said yes, you're right, this is unjust.
Speaker 2:The people of Wyndham need to have their community lands and so, long story short, they met at an oak tree just up the road from here. It's still there, it's called Kett's Oak, and they marched on Norwich, which is our nearest city, eight miles up the road. They defeated the King's army. They went on to London and they didn't win that one, but he formed an army of 16,000 people who were camped out in Norwich, and so they had their own system of discipline, their own system of feeding everyone. It was a really sophisticated mini society that was there for quite a while while they were preparing these battles, and he fought for the protection of the community benefit, the things that were good for the people. So when we needed to name our community bookshop, we realized that naming it after someone whose values we shared and who wanted to save something that was really vital to the community was the best way to go. So we called it Ket's Books.
Speaker 1:What a fabulous story and it's fascinating how his values and the bookshop's values line up. Ket's Books. What a fabulous story and it's fascinating how his values and the bookshop's values line up. It's beautiful.
Speaker 2:Well, it really is. But also I think it's one of the best things anyone can do when naming their business to name it after something that everyone feels ownership of in the town. So, particularly since we're a community bookshop for even people who haven't been in here feel like they own a little bit of the cat story and they get it and they know what it's about and they feel like with any of the other historical assets in the town. This is part of what belongs to them.
Speaker 1:And what happened to cats?
Speaker 2:Robert Kett was hung at Norwich Castle in December 1549. So the story doesn't have a really happy ending. And his brother, william, was hung from the abbey here in Wyndham. Oh my goodness. Yeah, that's not great, but they put their lives on the line. They fought the good fight. They fought the good fight and if you go back and look at what they actually asked for, it covers quite a lot of ground. It asks for things like common measurements when people are weighing out for trade to have a common system of measurement. So, yeah, they were really great leaders and we're very, very happy and fortunate to be able to name our business after them.
Speaker 1:And it's something to be proud of. Just before we go any further, I do want to explain. Wyndham is actually spelt capital W-Y-M-O-N-D-H-A-M, but it's pronounced Wyndham. It's definitely an English word that I had to hear pronunciated correctly, because otherwise I just knew I was going to say it incorrectly. It is.
Speaker 2:Yes, it's pronounced Wyndham. There are two Wyndhams in the UK. This is the Wyndham in Norfolk, which is just south of Norwich just south of Norwich, so ham at the end. You've got ham places all over the US, like Birmingham, and so I believe that's about being a hamlet. I don't know why the middle syllable got dropped, but Norfolk is full of these places that identify the locals or the visitors by their understanding of the pronunciation.
Speaker 1:When it comes to names that I'm not too sure how to pronounce, I Google how to pronounce and the name of the town or someone's name. It's the only way I can memorize pronunciation. Yeah, can you share with us how the bookshop is curated and by whom it's curated? Do you curate the store based on tourism Although, after hearing you speak, I'm guessing it has a lot to do with your community of readers but at the same time, you still have to make money.
Speaker 2:Well, every business does that, don't they? They have to sell what their market is going to want to read. So we have a lot of general interest. We have an awful lot of natural history. Books about trees go really, really well. We have a strong fiction section and a really strong children's section About the trees. We have two trees in our shop. They're not live trees but the trunks are real. We actually moved, I have to say. We were in a tiny, tiny little courtyard location for 10 years, and then that last year we moved onto the high street in a 20 room building.
Speaker 1:Wow, that's a lot of space, I know.
Speaker 2:And that's because we had outgrown the other and we needed to make room for our volunteers to all be able to live up to their potential and to be able to deliver to the community what we knew we could do. So I went to the public our volunteers, our customers, we have friends of the shop and I said, look, this is what we've done, this is what we could do. We need your backing and they backed us and we have been here in this new beautiful building here. That's another story.
Speaker 1:Do you use up all 20 rooms.
Speaker 2:No, no, it was great fun while they were vacant though.
Speaker 1:Yes, I bet it was wonderful having all that space to unpack boxes of books.
Speaker 2:Honestly, it was just so much fun after having been in a kind of 20 foot long building for 10 years and those wheelie step things that you get in bookshops and libraries are called a kick step. That was basically my desk for most of the 10 years. I sat on one of those with my laptop on my knees and then for about six months I had my choice of 20 rooms to knock around in. So now we have tenants, people who share our values, who are running other businesses, like a children's mental health service is here in our building. So it's really terrific because the benefit that our customers and our volunteers get from talking to each other our tenants are beginning to get by working together with each other. So it's a kind of business community in addition to the bookshop community. So that's really really wonderful.
Speaker 2:Um, so the curation we sell what our customers want to read. We are guided by what our um volunteers discover as well. They're in other bookshops listening to the radio, whatever. We have some pretty clear criteria and we do love an independent press, but it needs to be the right independent press. We do lean into working with the big publishers like penguin, faber, bloomsbury, cachette, because they have the editorial system. So we know there's a pretty good chance that it's going to be a well-written book, well-edited, well-presented and a decent physical product. But we do talk to people about their local books, particularly if they are a customer or if they shop in Wyndham. If they've written a book then we're interested in talking to them.
Speaker 1:Well, you have some fabulous small and medium presses in the UK and Ireland. One recently that I've discovered is Heloise Press, founded by Ina Marti, and one of their books, abandonment, was one of my favourite books of 2024. I thought it was fabulous. And then you also have Sort of Books, another independent publishing venture by Mark Ellingham and Natania Jantz Natania has actually been on the show. They published the Seven Moons of Mali Almeida by Sheyhan Karuna Talaka, and that won the 2022 Booker Prize. So I mean we have some fantastic small and medium presses globally. That's just two that I can think of off the top of my head. Tell me about what a typical day at the bookshop looks like for you and your volunteer community.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:Okay, so we are open 9.30 to 5. And is that seven days a week? There's six at the moment, but I'm working on seven.
Speaker 2:We have People on Arota. They know what their day is, they know who they're likely to be working with. So the front of shop team come in at 9.15. They are responsible for looking after the shop floor, opening boxes, putting books on the shelves, answering the phone, handling customer queries. Then we have a back room, which is still a treat, and in the back room we have other people who will be doing work. And because it's still a big building and we do have lots of work to do, we have a whole new kind of population of volunteers who would never have wanted anything to do with talking to customers about books, but they're really happy to come in and paint, and so we're able to reach a whole new section of the community who are getting the benefit of being part of us. So we've got kind of these three groups of people working at any given time. But what we do is we just have people start off just answering the phone, looking after the books, learning to run the till, but then, as we find out what they're good at, we give them other things to do. So everybody has kind of another job that they do when they're not busy with the customers.
Speaker 2:I was really influenced by marcus buckingham and the work he did around strengths a few years ago, and I think that that's the only way to manage people is to find out what makes them feel strong. So we, we give them the basics and then when I realize you're really good at this, we give them that to do as a job and then they love doing that. The thing that's different about KETS books I mean bookshops all have people who want to be there, but in KETS books in particular, in a community bookshop, people are all there because they really believe in it and they can't wait to come in. And lots of my people are in more than once a week because they just love it here and they're not looking at the clock. They want to be here.
Speaker 1:When we look at the current state or the turmoil of the world, I think libraries and bookshops are still safe places for people to gather and have conversations. Safe places for people to gather and have conversations. When I research the history of bookshops, in particular, radical bookshops around the world although the UK has a lot more than the US does at the moment, radical bookshops seem to be places where, even now, conversations can take place, you can share different points of view without hostility and aggression, and that's probably one of the main reasons I started this podcast. I wanted to support that safe space for conversations, for education, for acknowledgement of differences, and that's vital at this time.
Speaker 2:Yes, it really is. Yeah, and one of my favorite things is when customers start talking to each other.
Speaker 1:Oh, yes, that's wonderful. I've worked in a bookshop myself and, oh my goodness, that just used to make my heart sing. And that's what community and building relationships is all about. Yeah, Tracy, I read that Wyndham is a market town in South Norfolk. What defines a market town, a town and a village in the UK? Oh gosh, okay.
Speaker 2:So a village, I would say, is going to have houses in the hundreds, but the houses aren't spread out here. In a particularly rural village might be, but properties are a lot smaller here. People only have really as much garden as they will actually use. So in the US people might have a lot of land but they can't use all of it, can they? For instance, my garden is about, which means yard is about 50 feet long by about 30 feet wide, and that's perfectly fine for my family of four. But that also means that my neighbours are close. So if you have a hundred houses of that proportion, it's only going to cover a not very big area. That's your village.
Speaker 2:Villages also have a lot of charming buildings, so thatched roofs, exposed beams, that kind of thing. Town is going to be anything bigger than that, which is going to have services like schools, libraries, post office, a lot more shops. In a village you're going to have, if you're lucky, a pub, a library and a primary school. But a town is going to probably have a high school and so on. And then I'm going to say cities, apparently, officially, a city has to have a cathedral. You could have a place, a town, with a population in the hundreds of thousands. But if it doesn't have a cathedral then it's not designated a city. So you get really big towns asking, can you please make us a city? And they get turned down. That's an aside.
Speaker 1:And I'm guessing a market town is the size of a town, but throughout history it has had a place where markets can be held weekly. Is that right?
Speaker 2:I don't know exactly, but I do know that we have a market that goes back to the King John era. So you know, King John, Magna Carta era, that's when our market was established.
Speaker 1:Sounds like you enjoy history.
Speaker 2:I like history, I'm interested in history and we're surrounded by it. It's not that we necessarily have to go out and look for it. The pub in town is from the same era as our Abbey. The pub was built in the 13th century. It's not the only pub, but it's the most picturesque one. It's always there and people do understand it because it's just part of life.
Speaker 1:Now while we're on this subject, if anyone finds themselves with a few days in Wyndham, what historical sites, museums, hikes and restaurants would you suggest they visit? It sounds like that old pub is a must.
Speaker 2:Okay, so I would definitely go to the Abbey. The Abbey was built in 1108. It's magnificent. From the outside it looks like a ruin, but from the inside it is just magnificent and they hold concerts and various art things there, and the green dragon pub is just around the corner from it. So I would stop and have a meal there.
Speaker 2:Hikes I would say more walks, because we have no elevation. There's a lovely walk that runs alongside the river, along the abbey where there are animals grazing, and out past the allotments, which is community gardens for growing vegetables, along the railway. So it just goes and goes, so I would do that walk. We do have a museum, the Wyndham Heritage Museum, where you can learn more about the Robert Kett story. We have lots of independent shops, so I would say, come in and take your time so you can stop and have a coffee and then do a bit more, and then have lunch and then do a bit more and have a bit of cake, so you can go in all our lovely cafes. We do have a specifically vegan cafe. Um, I'm vegan and so I really appreciate it. They they don't label it anywhere, but if you order a coffee, it comes without milk. It's called loaf and they specialize in baked goods. So, yeah, you'd be all right here, it's lovely, and then a couple of days you could probably get a day and a half out of Wyndham, um.
Speaker 2:But then Norwich is fabulous and it's an UNESCO city of literature. It's only eight miles up the road. It has loads and loads of bookshops, it has the National Writers' Centre. It has the University of East Anglia, has a very esteemed creative writing programme that produced people like Ray Bradbury, kansu Oishiguru, margaret Atwood frequently does residencies there, so it's a serious writing programme. So we're very, very bookie and literary around here. So you would definitely want to go to Norwich as well, and Norwich is just a fabulous city and of course, let's not forget Ket's Books.
Speaker 1:That's a must visit.
Speaker 2:Well, obviously yes. First off, we do get people who come to Wyndham to visit the bookshop. But yes, definitely, and let's talk about books.
Speaker 1:What are you currently reading, Tracy?
Speaker 2:What am I currently reading? So there's a crime series by a man named Tim Solomon Over here. They're published by Bloomsbury, but they are available in the US. I did check, I'd heard really good things and I hadn't tried them. But I'm reading one that's being published in January called the Bookseller. Yeah, so an advanced copy, a digital advanced copy, and I'm really enjoying it.
Speaker 2:So the the detective in these stories. It's set in Bristol, which is in the southern UK. He has autism and so he doesn't always have all the social graces that might be called for in a situation. Occasionally he flips through his notebook to find out what he might be called for in a situation. Occasionally he flips through his notebook to find out what he's supposed to say in this situation. But the premise in this particular book and it's maybe sixth in the series is that a rare books dealer has been found in his bookshop stabbed through the heart. So they managed to get in ultra rich Russians and all sorts of other things, and I thought I knew who'd done it, but I was wrong. So I'm glad because I don't want it to be obvious. I'm really, really enjoying it actually.
Speaker 1:So I'm looking forward to pushing that into the customer's hands in January and the paperbacks in the meantime, I love thrillers and I enjoy crime thrillers, and I never really got into reading them until the pandemic. And then I couldn't stop reading them once I picked up the first one.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I've talked to William Shaw, who also writes a really great series of books crime books. I talked to him about when he came to one of our visits, one of our author talks, and he said that particularly women enjoy reading crime because in that story arc there's a reassurance that the baddie gets caught and that life is full of reasons to be afraid that things do go wrong. But justice works out, the baddie gets caught, everything will be okay. That's how he explains it. Um, I just think it's a relief between literature I. I mean, I really really enjoyed creation lake by rachel kushner. I really did. But then I needed something that was a bit lighter, that I wasn't trying to understand. I know that there's so much to Creation Lake that I felt like I needed to think about it and make sure I was getting all the benefit from it. But I don't have to do that with a crime novel. I can just enjoy it.
Speaker 1:I'm busy writing down all the names of the books you've just mentioned.
Speaker 2:I would be doing the same thing.
Speaker 1:Tracy, the stall looks absolutely gorgeous, Thank, you. And when I get to Wyndham I shall definitely pop in and visit. Website for Kett's Books is kettsbookscouk, and please check out the show notes for a list of the books that we've spoken about today. Tracy, thank you so much for being a guest on the Bookshop Podcast. It's been lovely getting to know you and to learn about Kett's Books.
Speaker 2:It's been great talking to you. Thanks very much, and come visit Wyndham and come and find us.
Speaker 1:You've been listening to my conversation with Tracey Kenney, co-founder of Ket's Books in Wyndham, the 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, Adrienne Otterhhan, and graphic design by Francis Farala. Thanks for listening and I'll see you next time.