HeyJaredTruly's Substack
Daily life from the shop-floor of a nearly-new (i.e. est in 2022) bookshop in the Welsh book town of Hay-on-Wye, North Books which sells new books focussing on female writing, environmental and Welsh literature.
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 5
- Latest publication
- Sep 29, 2026
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- Earliest in this view
- Jul 6, 2026
Latest issues
Heaven is a place called Hinkley off the M62 (opens the original)
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I asked a furtive pasty eater to finish her snack outside the bookshop and her partner said, “I didn’t realise the food police would be in here”. I didn’t realise part of running a bookshop would be managing people’s manners. This kind of episode wears me down. Is it wrong to want the bookshop not to honk of beef?In bigger news we have our latest installation by resident (I’m now calling her that, lest she think of fleeing the area) crafting wizard Hannah. The autumnal leaf curtain is up and the
It’s the end of summer but there’s still fun to be had! (opens the original)
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As though a gift from the God of irony, those in retail are rewarded with a bank holiday at the very end of the school summer holidays. I appreciate this is a bonus for those worker-bees who went on their annual holiday way back in June and are now longing for a 3-day weekend. But for anyone who has been smiling constantly since mid-July an (often rainy) bank holiday for trippers (aka browsers) is enough to send you over the edge, just when you thought you’d packed enough energy bars for the 6-w
Full swing (opens the original)
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A customer who, on asking me for a really specific book by an author I hadn’t heard of, misheard me when I said ‘our stock is both new and in most cases newly-published’ thought it was me that was ‘new’. On leaving, without the book in question (which was about 20 years old) he cheerfully said, ‘you look like you know what you’re doing so keep it up!’ I will try and hang onto this advice as the summer trading wears me down. As well as enunciating my words better!Subscribe now</sp
Highs, lows and someplace in-between (opens the original)
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Club Tropicana without the Wham! budget (opens the original)
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Since I last wrote I have been on a whistle-stop tour of the North East (by train, even though most of them were cancelled, although I’m not complaining as ours wasn’t, phew).<img alt="" class="sizing-normal" height="1600" src="https://substackcdn.com/i
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