Barter Books

Mary Manley, an art-history teacher from Memphis, opened Barter Books in 1991 in the front room of her husband Stuart's model-railway-parts factory — which happened to occupy Alnwick's grand disused station of 1887 — and the shop grew to fill the platforms: hundreds of thousands of secondhand books under the ironwork, open fires in winter, a model train running above the stacks, and the Station Buffet feeding 350,000 visitors a year. In 2000 the Manleys found a forgotten 1939 poster in an auction box, framed it by the till, and accidentally re-released Keep Calm and Carry On upon the world — the most consequential thing any secondhand bookshop has done this century. The New Statesman called it the British Library of secondhand bookshops; the barter boards still work the founding system.