Author: Sarah Henshaw
The Bookshop That Floated Away is a book by Sarah Henshaw narrating her experience of running a floating bookshop on a canal in England. The memoir follows Henshaw leaving a conventional career and moving onto a narrowboat, which she transformed into a traveling bookshop that cruised along the waterways of England.
Henshaw narrates her experience of life on the British canal system, but she also provides a cultural commentary on the culture (and struggles) of independent bookselling, eccentric customers, canal community, the logistics of starting a small business (and the struggle that comes along with it), and reflections on books, reading, and slow living. The bookshop was called the Book Barge, and she travelled through places like Oxford, Manchester, Leeds, Liverpool, and London, etc. She would stop at various locations and sell books from a boat. In that, she needed publicity, which she managed to obtain from the press, including the Independent and the Guardian, which resulted also in trading books for food and accommodation (she mentions a copious amount of Victoria sponge cake she got from members of various local communities, which I thought was really interesting).
Henshaw ends the book by tackling her debts, so she takes a job for a year to pay them off, and then she continues her journey and her work. She mentions in the book that she was writing a blog, but I was unable to find it. I found her website showing that she initially succeeded in moving to France to sell books on a boat, and she expanded her business by renting space for literary events. However, the website states the business is currently closed and has not had any updates, so I am not sure if this business still exists.
In either case, The Bookshop That Floated Away was a valuable reading experience because it is based on a real-life story, written in first person, and this real experience provided an illustration of independent bookshops as sites of cultural capital formation because Henshaw described her small, curated stock, interactions with customers including recommendations for books based on taste, discovering new authors and books, and literary events on the boat (e.g., after publicity, some authors offered to do free readings of their books to support her). She described the Book Barge less as a retail space but more as a cultural field, which I obviously enjoyed reading. The business also had a high symbolic value but weak economic stability, which shows a tension between what Bourdieu would call symbolic capital (prestige, charm, cultural meaning of the floating bookshop) and economic capital (low profitability). The floating bookshop had first, but struggled with the second, showing that symbolic capital only works when applied to the right field.
I am not sure what she is doing now, but I hope that Sarah Henshaw can continue this business or find some other meaning in life. A fantastic book in either case, worth reading.
Thank you for reading!