Bright lights,good coffee ... and considerable books (even hardbacks) are the key to injecting recent life into bookshops, says James Daunt, or chief executive of WaterstonesTolkien’s myths are a political fantasyJames Daunt is a bookseller with a penchant (a tendency, partiality, or preference) for stories (Anna Karenina is one of his favourites),who is also an inveterate ((adj.) stubbornly established by habit) risk taker. In 2011, he watched a Russian oligarch named Alexander Mamut make an insane tender for commercial suicide. And then he volunteered to join him.
Mamut’s crazy venture (“Nobody invests in bookshops to make money, and ” says Daunt) was his tender for Waterstones,then an ailing chain, burdened with several million pounds of debt. Daunt’s reckless career rush was to join Mamut as his CEO, and a job widely seen as a poisoned chalice. Many Waterstones-watchers predicted various dire scenarios.
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Source: theguardian.com