The Miracle of Fore Street

After six months of planning (and over a decade of dreaming), plus lots of hard work and support from family and friends, we finally got to remove ‘Opening Soon’ from the website and actually opened the East Gate Bookshop! We were overwhelmed by the response from the people of Totnes and after an emotional and exhausting day there was no champagne, just finally being able to spend a little more quality time with our children and treating ourselves to an early night.

The fiction run - actual books on the shelves…

Shop dog; not ours - ours is too badly behaved to meet the public.

So, we finally opened a bookshop! One of the reasons we put in our ‘cons’ to consider before embarking on this was, “it will break us’” and it nearly did. The central heating malfunction, the locks deciding to fail after a decade of issue-free use and breaking our internet the afternoon before opening (yes, we really did) was stress we could have really done without - but our Saturday opening made up for that so much.

Now onwards to Christmas and getting enough cash back into the business to pay all the enormous bills we have accumulated. We never, ever embarked on this for the money, which is a very good job, as there won’t be much left.