Paul Walters left a seventeen-year career at Newark Steel to open Newark Bookshop on Queens Head Court in July 2025. The shop occupies a small unit near the market place and stocks a tightly curated range across fiction, non-fiction, graphic novels and children's books, with most titles held as a single copy rather than multiples. Walters selects everything himself and plans a dedicated section for regional authors to sell their own work. The shop also lists titles through Bookshop.org, an online platform that channels a share of sales back to independent stores rather than a single retailer. Staffing is limited to Walters and, unofficially, a shop cat named Sam. The compact footprint limits how much stock the shop can carry at once, so the selection changes often rather than sitting static on the shelves.
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