My career change was accidental. I was a photographer. Then I was a mother. The world went into lockdown. And then I had no job.
It’s hard to remember how it felt during those dark days in 2020, but normal life seemed impossible. Taking photos meant leaving the house and interacting with people. Yuck! People could kill me! And what about this small child? He needed looking after. So I retreated into books; reading them but also buying them. Lots of them. And then one day I looked up and realised, oh. I live… in a bookshop?
Buying books at auction was my way of coping with my new life. I felt marooned on my own private island, and not in a good way. Every day the doormat would thud with a new book arriving. Soon I had boxes of them. I had a crazy idea, I told my husband: I might try and sell them.
So I did. I started small, selling first through eBay and Etsy (please, reader be warned, never sell through Etsy), before branching out to my own online shop. At first it was a jumble of what I liked to read; crime, cookbooks, travel writing. Then slowly… just cookbooks. It was a natural fit. I was a bookseller.
The thing about running an online bookshop — and this may surprise you — is that you need books. A constant supply of books. As a secondhand bookseller specialising in vintage cookbooks my job isn’t as straightforward as, say, Waterstones. No.
I have to hunt for my books — on auction websites, in mothy houses, at the back of charity shops beside the fire exit where people pee. And do you know what? I love it. Because there is nothing sweeter, that near-ecstasy feeling (for me, anyway), of finding a long-forgotten cookbook by a long-forgotten author and breathing new life into it. It’s bliss.
As Candlestick Books approaches its second birthday I still can’t quite believe I have managed to keep at it — I am prone to abandoning things, you see. Yet scrolling through the shop’s website and looking at all the books I have found (and sold) fills me with immense pride, a bit like watching your own Instagram story a hundred times.
I’ve inadvertently amassed a large catalogue of rare, out-of-print cookbooks and I’ll be sharing their recipes and design here, on my Substack.
For now the bookshop is online only. But who knows what the future may hold?