Grass Roots Books

Grass Roots Books was Manchester's radical bookshop from 1971 – 1990 selling left-wing, feminist, anti-racist, environmental and alternative books, newspapers, magazines, pamphlets and badges and providing a hub for information exchange.

Grass Roots became the largest UK radical bookshop outside London and for most of that time it was run as a worker co-operative using the Industrial Common Ownership Movement (ICOM) model rules with a changing membership of workers who ran the bookshop as a collective.

Grass Roots was a member of the Federation of Radical Bookshops a predecessor of the Radical Booksellers' Alliance. An archive of Grass Roots Books, including staff and customer recollections of its impact has been placed in the Manchester Archives.

History
In the 1970s radical bookshops were started in many UK cities, providing access to books, pamphlets and magazines that were stocked by only a limited number of traditional bookshops or newsagents. Grass Roots began in 1971 fairly near the University on Upper Brook Street and from there moved closer to the student area, first to 100 Oxford Road and then the basement of 178 Oxford Road, Waterloo Place, a building owned by Manchester University. It aimed to sell publications unavailable elsewhere and to provide a community hub for local campaigns.

It stocked magazines from newly-formed publishers such as Spare Rib and Undercurrents and books from new publishers such as Virago Press as well as from longer-established campaigns such as the CND and the Anti-Apartheid Movement and the more radical offerings of mainstream publishers such as the Penguin Education series (which included Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire) and the Heinemann African writers series. In 1975 a collective, which had formed to take on the shop, took a lease on 109 Oxford Road next to the On the Eighth Day wholefood shop and opposite the then Manchester Polytechnic.

The stock at that time is described in the NWLHJ article as including "a wide range of titles on Marxism, socialism, anarchism, feminism and sexual politics, third world politics and history and anti-racism. It stocked sections on organic gardening, vegetarian and vegan cooking, self-sufficiency, mind-body-spirit, fiction, science fiction, art, music and children's books. The fiction section included women's fiction, fiction from third world authors and a small amount of lesbian and gay fiction."

In 1977 Grass Roots opened a second shop in the basement of 1 Newton St at Piccadilly, a more central location. Although the Oxford Road premises closed in 1979, Grass Roots was the largest co-operatively run bookshop in Britain. The shop ran from the large, city-centre basement premises until 1990 when rising rents, undercapitalisation and changes across the book trade contributed to its demise. A new entity, Frontline Books, took over the lease and ran a successor radical bookshop from 1990 to 2000.

The influence of Grass Roots has been recorded in poems by Sarah Pritchard. and Jackie Kay. The article in the North West Labour History Journal by former members of the co-operative describes the shop's history, some of the challenges of collective working, fascist attacks, challenging sexism in the publishing industry and the type of stock sold by Grass Roots Books

Stock
Grass Roots Books and other radical bookshops provided an outlet for the distribution of the many small press books and pamphlets in which left-wing, anti-racist, feminist, environmental, anarchist and anti-nuclear thinkers shared their thoughts and ideas. These included How the West Indian Child Is Made Educationally Sub-normal in the British School System by Bernard Coard published by New Beacon Books in 1971. The influence of Bernard Coard’s work in showing the extent of racism in the education system was referenced by Steve McQueen in the Education film of the TV series Small Axe in 2020.

Another pamphlet, Protest and Survive by EP Thompson (the title is a reference to the British government's Cold War information leaflet Protect and Survive which had been distributed to all households) sold thousands of copies in the early 1980s and has been credited with the renaissance of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). Other pamphlets provided information on legal rights for minorities such as Your Rights in Mental Hospital published by the local Mental Patients Union, a series of guides published by Manchester Law Centre on immigration rights and women's rights, including Manchester Women’s Handbooks on Marriage Breakdown and Housing Law and Social Security, and ''Women! You don't have to put up with being battered'' published jointly with the National Women's Aid Federation in 1978.

There was no internet for people to find out their rights in those days. In the 1980s Grass Roots Books published The Law and Sexuality subtitled How to cope with the law if you are not 100% heterosexual. These and other publications such as those from the Child Poverty Action Group on the rights of disabled people and on surviving the benefits system were distributed by Grass Roots Books to public libraries nationally. Many libraries had Community Information sections to support their local communities.

US imports were a Grass Roots Books speciality. These included many feminist books, lesbian and gay books and books that would now be counted mainstream such as vegetarian and wholefood cookbooks. In 1978 Penguin Books published a British edition of the bestselling Our Bodies Ourselves, an iconic women’s health handbook, prior to that the imported US edition was a bestseller. Another imported speciality was cheaply produced Chinese editions of Marxist and Leninist classics such as The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels imported from the Foreign Languages Press in Peking (now Beijing). Virago Press which started to publish in 1975 and The Women's Press publishing from 1978 would later provide many feminist titles to radical bookshops and a wider range of bookshops. Gay and lesbian titles were imported from the USA and offered nationally by mail order through a Gay Booklist.

From 1975, Grass Roots traded in publishers' remaindered books, which are discounted titles, often overstocks of a hardback when a paperback has been published. As with other radical bookshops, Grass Roots sold alternative magazines including Undercurrents, Spare Rib, The Leveller and Radical Philosophy and local publications such as Mancunian Gay, Women's Liberation Newsletter and Mole Express. Many magazines and journals were sourced through the Publications Distribution Cooperative and its successors Scottish and Northern Distribution and Full Time Distribution, and books could increasingly be sourced through other distributors such as Central Books and Third World Publications. Left-wing newspapers such as the Morning Star and Socialist Worker were placed in the shop on a sale or return basis, as was An Phoblacht an Irish Republican newspaper.

Activities other than bookselling
Grass Roots Books stocked posters (including from the feminist See Red Women's Workshop, badges, jewellery and postcards on radical themes (including those from Leeds Postcards) and records distributed by WRPM (Women's Revolutions per Minute) - the archive for WRPM is held at Goldsmiths.

Noticeboards in the shop's stairwell provided a unique source of information on house-shares, events and protests. The bookshop offered local radical groups an address to receive post and was the main way in which demonstrations and meetings were publicised in the days before the internet, mobile telephones and social media.

In later years Grass Roots held author events and took part in Feminist Book Fortnight. Grass Roots workers contributed to the Federation of Radical Booksellers. In November 2022, four former members of the Grass Roots Co-operative (Maggie Walker, Rick Seccombe, Gay Jones and Fran Devine) deposited an archive of the bookshop and its impact locally with the Manchester Central Library Archives.