She loves books; he loves trains and they run one of Europe's biggest secondhand bookshops in a former railway station. Karen Dent meets Mary and Stuart Manley, the couple behind Barter Books in Alnwick.
MARY and Stuart Manley met when he threw her a note during a transatlantic plane journey.
US-born Mary was returning to the UK after visiting her father in Missouri and Englishman Stuart was on his way home.
“I opened it up and it said: ‘if you want to talk to me, raise your hand’,” says Mary. “I’d asked for a seat on my own because I just wanted to read a book, I didn’t want to hear some man talking about how his wife didn’t understand him.
“But this was too good – so I raised my hand, Stuart sat down, and basically in the course of the flight, he told me how his wife didn’t understand him (laughs). He was getting divorced, and I thought, ‘this isn’t good’. But it ended up really well; we got married three years later.”
Stuart says it was “the ultimate in luck”.
“I don’t go round chatting up women; it was only because frankly, I was transfixed and I thought I must do something,” he says.
“So I watched the first in-flight movie all the way through still thinking how I could do it and before the second in-flight movie, I conceived the idea of writing a note.
“It’s that combination of luck and action. If I hadn’t thrown her the note, the luck of us meeting wouldn’t have made any difference; you actually have to do something. It’s grasping your luck when it comes along, recognising it.”
Luck is something the pair admit they’ve been blessed with since opening Barter Books in Alnwick’s former railway station in 1991.
At the time, Stuart was making models for rail modellers and war gamers in part of the building.
“I ran it for 10 years and it was singularly unsuccessful,” he says.
“It was never unsuccessful enough to make me give up, but never successful enough to let you get anywhere.
“We had just done a remarketing with new packaging and we’d hocked our all into the bank and it doubled sales, but we needed to triple sales to get us out of the trouble.
“Way back in those days of 20 years back, the interest rates were so high, we were just heading for the rocks. We were paying back the interest, but we weren’t paying back the loan. We were heading for bankruptcy at high speed.
“Then Mary had her little idea.”
Mary worked in an antiquarian bookshop in the US and taught art history before coming to the UK to study at St John’s College in Oxford.
She says: “As I tell people often, there’s nothing more inspiring than an overdraft. The only thing I knew anything about was books; it was either teaching or working in a bookshop. In 1991, I needed something to do, needed money and I’d always wanted a bookshop – but only secondhand.
“I was driving up to Lindisfarne, because I was doing voluntary work, and I thought maybe I could start a secondhand bookshop and call it Barter Books, have a little barter system. Stuart liked the idea and said ‘let’s give it a go’.”
Starting off in a tiny part of the building, which was built in the 1880s and closed as a station in 1968, Barter Books grew and grew.
Stuart says: “By 1992, we expanded the bookshop and made the factory as small as we could.
“But one more year told us our future was in books, not in models, so I had a big sale in the model press – ‘your last chance to buy this stuff’ – and we actually got more orders in three months than we’d had in the previous two years.
“And it wiped out our overdraft, so it meant we could start progressing the bookshop from an even playing field instead of trying to play catch- up.”
Mary says: “We’d make a bit of money and then throw it back into the shop. We still do – it’s our pleasure really and it’s good business too, I think.”
