Book shopping online at Crediton Community Bookshop

Think about favourite places, places where you can while away time, where you can forget about everything that’s going on around you and bookshops come pretty much top of my list.

It’s one of life’s pleasures to stand in a beautiful independent bookshop and lose yourself in the carefully curated titles, seemingly handpicked just for you. I know I’m not alone in scanning through the titles, admiring the artwork of beautiful children’s books and choosing the perfect book as a gift for friends and family and, more often than not, for myself.

Just outside Exeter, Crediton Community Bookshop is one such place. A warm welcome, cosy atmosphere and shelves stacked with books, books and more books. You just know that every single one has been selected with care and thought.  And although the shop, which is on Crediton High Street, has been forced to close to instore browsing due to lockdown, it is still making sure we can all continue to get our reading fix.

They are well set up for online orders, telephone consultations and even online virtual browsing. You can even (this is a great touch) call up via Facetime and they’ll walk you through the books, help you choose what you need with ideas for every member of your family. They’re real experts, but they’re warm, friendly and helpful with an amazing knowledge of books, old and new. The other day I tweeted them to find a couple of books of walks on Dartmoor, they responded very quickly, to say they had one in stock and they could get me the other (despite it being out of print). In that instant; I knew how J R Hartley must have felt in that Yellow Pages advert all those years ago when he found his book on fly fishing (if you don’t get that reference, congratulations you are very youthful. FYI; he was over-the-moon).

The bookshop is community-owned, having been ‘saved’ from closure by local people in 2013. It is a community interest company, which means it exists to have a social impact, so when you buy from them you know you’re buying from a bookseller which pays its taxes, supports local jobs and helps to keep the high street alive. It also does some amazing outreach work; taking authors on tours of local schools, running creative writing workshops and every year partnering with Crediton Foodbank enabling people to donate a book to those supported by the foodbank.

This is an organisation I’m really pleased to support, their personal service and extra little caring touches really make all the difference. At Crediton Community Bookshop 30% of their annual trade during is in November and December. Like other independent bookshops, they need our support now more than ever, and I for one am happy to stop lining Jeff Bezos’s pockets!

Crediton Community Bookshop is very kindly offering Exploring Exeter readers 10% off their book orders with this code EXEXNOV2020 AND amazingly, there is also free postage during November – So get your present lists ready, get involved and let’s help keep this independent community-owned bookshop alive!

You can visit Crediton community bookshop here.