Page 45

Stephen L. Holland and Mark Simpson opened Page 45 in 1994 on the conviction that comics were literature and deserved a bookshop rather than a den — a stance so thoroughly vindicated that Holland served as the UK's Comics Laureate from 2021 to 2023, the trade's highest advocacy post, while still working his own till on Market Street. Simpson died in 2005, mourned across the industry; Jonathan Rigby has been the other director since 2012, and the shop's handwritten-review culture remains the national reference for what a graphic novel section should be. Thirty-plus years of insisting on the art form, from the city that took the point early.