Selling Books in London from a 100-Year-Old Dutch Barge

Word on the Water, a floating bookstore on a 1920s Dutch barge, was founded in 2011 by Paddy Screech and Jon Privett. It is currently moored in Regents Canal in King’s Cross, London.

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What’s your favorite section of the store?
The children’s room deep inside the barge is my favorite—there’s a crackling coal stove, a big sofa with battered Moroccan cushions that Jon found for a song in Marrakesh, a golden unicorn, two ornate vintage Dutch telephones and children’s books crammed into every corner and all over every surface. There’s also an ornate Victorian cash register which dispenses free sweets and invites anyone cheeky enough to press one of the buttons (which is everyone) to make a wish.

What would you say is your bookstore’s specialty?​
We love cult literature—especially writing from the US in the 1950s and 1960s—we like—”griterature,” writing that speaks with authentic experience about life’s most extreme and liminal events, we like Bukowski, Knausgaard, Beckett, Kelman, Fante, Kerouac—we have a wonderful hardback first edition of Doctor Sax at the moment that you can still sense the pipe smoke and horn-rimmed sunglasses of the earliest days of the Beat movement on.

Do you have bookstore pets or animal regulars?
For many years the ship was haunted by two feline familiars—Queenie and Skitty. When we started we had not mastered cat litter management and the whole shop used to pong shamefully. These two lovely, elderly cats are no longer with us, and now Star—the barge’s increasingly famous collie-beagle cross rules the roost. She can obsessively chase a tennis ball all day, which accounts for a youthful spark despite his 15 years. In addition an eccentric extended family of friendly terriers and chihuahuas can often be seen skittering around.

What’s your favorite book to hand-sell?​
Most magical is when among our relatively tiny selection, we end up having exactly the thing for someone—the Korean lady who cried when she found a 19th-century copy of Tacitus in Latin for her classics-studying brother—or the look of deep, private delight in the eyes of people who come out clutching tiny hardback copies of The Little Prince, reclaiming precious childhood stories from back when they were tiny themselves.

If you had infinite space what would you add (other than a bar/restaurant)? Be specific.
Cornwall. And—perhaps more realistically, a tea and cake shop. We hope to make that a reality soon.

Who’s your favorite regular?
Stewart Lee the comedian and writer—and a friend from years back—has a way of turning up with boxes full of wonderful, surprising titles to donate regularly. He is sent a cornucopia of books to review, and turns up looking like an ancient fisherman in his big grey beard to donate them to us.

What’s the craziest situation you’ve ever had to deal with in the store?
Being a foot deep in water after a leak one freezing January morning, having to pump it out by hand while it literally froze on the books.

What’s been the biggest surprise about running a bookstore?
That it doesn’t get boring, and that the endless goodwill that the barge generates should make it such a consistently happy and healthy place to be.

Tell us about your most memorable author event.​
I was sitting in the drizzle in Paddington many years ago and filled up a gap in the display in front of a beret-wearing, distinguished customer. He turned to me and asked, “Why did you put that book there?” I looked down, confused. The book I had placed in the gap was The Famished Road by Ben Okri. I blustered through a brief description of the book, explaining that Okri was one of Britain’s foremost authors, originally a Nigerian poet, winner of the Booker Prize. I was bluffing a bit and hadn’t read the book myself. “I am Ben Okri.” He went on to become a great friend of the shop, eventually filming for the BBC in the back deck when the Booker Prize winners were announced the filtering year and perpetually demanding absurdly low prices for his purchases, jokingly intoning “But I am Ben Okri.”

What’s the book you want to bring back into print?
There’s a wonderful book describing the history of the first great Mississippi showboat by Billy Bryant called Children of Ol’ Man River.

Have you felt any shift in what it means to be a bookseller during the Trump administration?
We are currently in the midst of a massive explosion in sales of real books right across the English-speaking world. Nonfiction in particular. I don’t think people trust the Internet as a source of serious information as much as they once did—and people are furiously educating themselves—about climate change, about diversity, about political consciousness. If people’s book buying behavior is anything to go by there is every reason for optimism, despite the dismal, outdated mediocracy of political leadership at the moment.

What’s your favorite thing to sell at the bookstore that’s not a book?​
Art, art, art. We have a number of really talented loan and boat-based artists who sell their work through us—and our nearness to the famous Central Saint Martins (CSM) art college means that we also carry a lot of fine art titles.

What’s a children’s book that you think all adults should read?
Watership Down by Richard Adams. All of life is contained therein.

What’s a bestseller that could only be big in your store?
We are egotistically delighted when we can sell books we’re actually in, and My Cool Houseboat by Jane Field-Lewis is one of them.