Let me introduce myself. I’m Pat and I run The Gently Used Book Club. We’re a subscription service for monthly boxes of pre-loved (gently used!) books.
I’ve been working in the book trade for many years, starting off as a secondhand book dealer way back in 2001. Somewhere along the way I got sidetracked into new books and I worked for a certain chain of High Street booksellers for nearly ten years. More recently I’ve been back with my first love – secondhand books.
For the last 6 years I’ve been running our online books and music shop WV Books and Vintage, but you know what, the trouble with online bookshops is that you never quite get to know your customers, even your loyal regulars. I really missed meeting book lovers. I missed telling them about a great new author I had discovered. I missed helping them find just the right book. Also somewhere around the middle of another lockdown I began to find it really difficult to decide what to read next. As though making that choice for myself was just a stretch too far for my lockdown-addled brain.
And so an idea began to form….
What if there was a subscription service for used books, where someone with many years of knowledge and love for books, could choose books for you? I would get to know our subscribers and their many-varied tastes, so that I could pick the best books for them.
And of course by reusing pre-loved books we’re helping to save the planet. It’s a terrible waste if a book is only read by one person in its lifetime. We want to spread the love of books as far and as wide as we can. We’d like every book to be read by lots of people. And by using secondhand books we can keep our costs down, so that for the price of a couple of cups of coffee a month you can have one of our boxes delivered right to your door. And these are all books that may have ended up in landfill.
What’s that you say? You want to hear more about the books? Well, of course you do. We have a stock of thousands of books from the very latest paperbacks through to vintage books from the 1950s. We carry all genres too. Whether you prefer spooky horror stories or heartwarming romances we have just the book for you and we’ll take the time to get to know you and understand what you like so that we can carry on choosing the best gently used books for you every month. The very best bit is that every box is a surprise that we hope will delight you. We want you to find new authors and discover great books you might not have picked for yourself.
Does that sound like a plan to you? Together we are going to solve mysteries, explore new galaxies, set off on quests and go back in time.
What do you say? Do you want to come along?
