Don’t despair of Gen Z – they’re now ditching phones for book stores

They may not be rattling through three novels a week, but young people are breathing new life into independent shops

Is there any pastime whose imminent demise is more often predicted than reading (of books, that is, not social media rants)? Latest to join the chorus of lamentation is Sir Jonathan Bate, the distinguished Shakespeare scholar who is currently a Professor of Environmental Humanities in Global Futures at Arizona State University.
Sir Jonathan recently bemoaned the fact that his students were strangers to reading. Instead of galloping through their reading lists at a hectic rate of three novels a week – as the habit was in his (and my) undergraduate days, the current generation struggles, he said, to get through one novel in three weeks.
It is apparently not just students who resist the lure of literature. In its report on the state of the nation’s adult reading, the literacy charity The Reading Agency reported that “Half of all adults in the UK don’t read regularly for pleasure”. In response, a newspaper suggested six ways to get back into the reading habit, including “Don’t treat reading like a chore”. Alas, the very existence of such well meaning articles indelibly stamps reading as a chore, as worthy and unenticing as doing more exercise and eating leafy greens.
But if reading (and those retro artefacts, books) are inexorably destined to join the critically endangered list of such quaint craft skills as frame knitting and orrery making, how to account for the latest figures from the Publishers Association, which found that in 2023, UK publishing revenue was some £7.1 billion – the highest recorded for the industry?
If reading is resurgent, so too are the UK’s independent booksellers – another group whose extinction is regularly predicted. Menaced by discounted online sales and the decline of the high street, indy book shops have recovered from a low point of 867 in 2016 to 1072 in 2022 – and according to a survey by the Booksellers Association, the keenest customers for buying books from physical bookshops, rather than online, are the digital natives of Gen Z.
They might seek inspiration from BookTok, but when it comes to buying books, Gen Z have apparently succumbed to the charm of real-life bookshops, with their personal recommendations from knowledgeable humans, their pleasing eccentricity and picturesque Instagrammability. They may be too young to remember Hugh Grant’s bumbling courtship of Julia Roberts as the hapless bookseller of Notting Hill, but they cherish the vibe.
From James Joyce to Ann Patchett, authors have celebrated bookshops. Nancy Mitford immortalised her wartime job at the Heywood Hill bookshop in Mayfair (its owner, George Heywood Hill, called it “a tiny first-class kennel for underdogs”) in her novel The Pursuit of Love, where her heroine, Linda Radlett, takes a moribund Communist bookshop from loss to profit by substituting childhood favourites for Leftist tracts. 
More recently, the novelist Ann Patchett, who opened Parnassus Books in Nashville in 2011, has written about running a bookshop that thrived on valuing books and readers above the novelty merchandise – “muffins and adorable plastic watering cans” – favoured by chain bookstores. 
A decade on, Parnassus thrives, as do the veterans Shakespeare and Company. Reports of the demise of reading may spring up as irrepressibly as bindweed, but for now, at any rate, they are greatly exaggerated.
These days there must be an infinity of alternatives to the laborious business of stitching name tapes to endless school kits. The website of Cash’s name tapes – the OG of kit-marking – offers stick-on or iron-on labels, which could have spared me precious hours during my days of sewing labels to every sock owned by my son (most of which found perpetual oblivion in the PE department’s capacious Lost Property bin).
But there cannot be a mother’s heart of a certain vintage that didn’t feel a terrible pang at the sight of Sandy Irvine’s sock, carefully marked with a name tape and recently discovered on the north face of Mount Everest, a century after his attempt to reach the summit with his fellow climber, George Mallory.
Irvine was just 22 when he died – old enough to lose his life pursuing an awfully big adventure. But still young enough for someone to undertake that humblest and fondest of tasks, and sew his name tape into his sock.