”A black beauty,” a friend emailed rather kindly when we forwarded a photograph of the boat a few weeks after purchase. Generous is an understatement. We had somewhat savagely ripped out all the interior fixtures and fittings, sanded much of the paintwork to reveal a measles of rust spots and badly scratched the remainder through some novice zig-zagging of the canal system from its previous mooring in Warwick to final destination near Lichfield, Staffordshire.

Today the narrowboat – a 57′ cruiser stern – looks a little more presentable. It was purchased in February 2009 as a part-finished houseboat complete with power shower, barbecue stand and a bottle of Hawaiian Tropic tanning oil. Wiser people would have realised the happy potential of such a trinity and let the boat be…

The transformation from living space to commercial venture was completed in three months with the help of family and friends. It is currently moored along the main shopping promenade at Barton Marina where the 42 hp engine and impressive pair of bow thrusters occasionally groan under the weight of hardback Solzhenitsyn anthologies. Or Babar the Elephant.

In 2010 we doubled our fleet with the purchase of a handsome wooden rowing boat. ‘Josephine’ serves stowaways and daydreams. She is our greatest pleasure and also much loved by spiders.

At heady speeds of 4mph any narrowboat enterprise would struggle to advocate life in the fast lane. Keep it static, add a bookshop and you get the very antithesis of Gordon Gekko’s famous ‘lunch is for wimps’ ethos about corporate time poverty.

Interestingly, the slow movement started out all about lunch. In 1986 Carlo Petrini, a foodie from the wonderfully named town of Bra, near Turin, was so incensed by the opening of a McDonald’s in Rome that he set about spearheading a campaign to promote sustainable food production and return mealtimes to a slower, more fulfilling pastime. Since then, the idea has spread paradoxically rapidly to influence other lifestyle aspects. Alastair Sawday, author of the travel books that bear his name, explains: “It’s really a celebration of people doing things with integrity. It resists the homogenisation of food and culture, and longs for the return to a sense of place.”

Most independent bookshops already aspire to many of these values – promoting stock diversity, strengthening community ties, the act of reading itself. By setting one up on a canal boat, however, the general idea hopefully becomes a little more explicit. In short, we hope to promote a less hurried and harried lifestyle of idle pleasures, cups of tea, conversation, culture and, of course, curling up with an incomparably good Book Barge purchase…

Not, as the name suggests, solely books about barges, which many people tell us is “A Very Great Shame Indeed”. Apologies. Instead, the bookshop comprises a mix of new and secondhand fiction that tries to reflect the very best of contemporary, classic and children’s literature. Books have been carefully selected to offer a quality alternative to high street bestseller lists including, among others, specialist sections exploring topical issues, titular oddities and travel ephemera. Although a bookseller should never admit to judging works on their cover, we are also rather proud pureyors of some dazzling dustjackets and retro paperbacks.

For the open-minded, we offer a personal bibliotherapy service, helping you find new titles to complement your current reading  preferences or to see you through big changes in your life - bereavement, babies or just a year out bumming around Thailand.

If you cannot find the book you are looking for please use our in-store ordering service or ring 07946 605324. Most titles can be here in 24 hours. If you live within bicycling distance we’ll be happy to deliver the books personally as they come in, while waterside residents can make use of  our unique dinghy delivery service. Those a little further afield can sometimes entice a scooter courier in return for a compensatory cuppa when we arrive.

The Boat

The Books

The Basic Idea