I quit my well-paid job with one of the world's best-selling magazines to open a bookstore

Tom Rowley's bookstore Backstory will open later this month and replace his pop-up in Balham, south London.

Paul Grover

• Tom Rowley quit his well-paid job to open a bookstore in Balham, south London.
• He worked for 11 years as a reporter for The Economist, one of the world's most popular magazines.
• This is Rowley's account of pursuing his dream, as told to Insider's Sam Tabahriti.

This as-told-to article is based on an exchange between Tom Rowley, a former journalist who resigned as a reporter with The Economist to open a bookstore, and Insider's Sam Tabahriti. It has been edited for length and clarity.

It was an ordinary assignment, not unlike the thousands I had been given in my decade as a journalist.

Back in the early summer of 2020, as Britain was slowly emerging from its first COVID-19 lockdown, my editor at The Economist packed me off to research an article about bookshops.

She even recommended a lovely one she was familiar with, the Aldeburgh Bookshop in Suffolk, England.

I spent the morning there on the first day they were allowed to open their doors again. Perched in the corner with my notebook, I jotted down everything that struck me.

The excitement etched on the faces of some of the regulars, deprived of their bookshop for only a couple of months but what seemed like a lifetime; the familiarity with which the owners, Mary and John James, greeted customers; even the way nobody seemed to notice the one-way system that had been patiently drawn out on the floor to permit social distancing, so eager were they to browse the shelves.

'I loved being behind a till'

I wrote my article and moved on to the next story – only I didn't really move on. That trip to Aldeburgh had reawakened something, buried during my years on Fleet Street: I loved being behind a till.

Lots of kids love playing shop, but I took it to extremes. At about the age of seven, I turned my bedroom into a store called Pen & Paper, hawking stationery and newspaper supplements to every visitor to our house. 

My grandfather, Reginald Lord, who I always knew as Pop, had scraped together enough money from driving lorries and similar hard toil to open a tool-hire shop in Newcastle in the early 1970s. My dad and my uncle ended up running the company and expanding it to more than a dozen branches.

My mum set up her own shops in Corbridge, the Northumberland village where I grew up. I spent most Saturdays as a teenager serving customers in her gift shop and teaching her kindly but technologically illiterate sales assistants how to use the till.

I don't think it's a coincidence that the children of business owners often go on to set up shop themselves. I had seen first-hand the stresses and strains, the late nights hunched over spreadsheets and the family rows, of course.

But I'd also seen the thrill of turning a vague idea into a physical reality and the freedom of running your own show. Most importantly, it made the idea of cutting loose and setting up on my own seem less daunting: if mum was brave enough to do it, why wasn't I?

'Madness'

And so, in March, I took the plunge, quitting a secure, well-paid job that I loved. Later this month I will open my bookshop called Backstory in Balham, southwest London.

In one sense, my decision was madness, particularly given the darkening skies of the economy that soon brewed up into the current storm. In another, though, it was coming home, combining my seven-year-old's love of shops with my grown-up habit of spending hours browsing bookshops, always coming out calmer, grounded by like-minded company – and with a big pile of reading. 

I do not pretend that the next few years will be easy. The shop rent and business rates alone come to about £75,000 ($86,600) a year, which means I have to sell 15,000 or so books just to pay those fixed costs.

I am also dreading opening my first energy bill. But I am buoyed by the knowledge that so many others share my feeling that bookshops are far more than just another stop on the high street.

'Extraordinary enthusiasm'

To readers they are places to treasure, to belong to, just like a local pub. Sure, you can get any book delivered to your door the next day, but those brown parcels can never replicate that feeling of community, of belonging.

That explains, I think, the extraordinary enthusiasm about Backstory so far: more than 500 people generously chipped in to a crowdfunding campaign to cover the costs of fitting out the shop. We have reached our goal, but the campaign is up for another week if anybody else fancies having their name above our bookcases. 

Whatever happens, it is going to be an adventure. I loved reporting, but after 11 years, I had begun to repeat myself. Now, every morning brings a different challenge, from negotiating with publishers to working out how to fix the fire alarm.

And if I need some advice from fellow booksellers? Well, perhaps I should pay another visit to Aldeburgh. 

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