A New Chapter Starts Now: For the first time, in one place

Dear Reader,

In December 2024, Wardah Books hosted a get-together for independent booksellers in Singapore. As far as I know, this is the first such meeting of independent booksellers of Malay, Chinese and English books. Other than a feeling that this was a significant event, I didn't know what to expect. As it turned out, if you put people with common purpose in a room, they become comrades very quickly, especially after trading war stories. With all the reports of closures and downsizings, Singapore's independent bookshops were not having a good year in 2024. We needed to come together, if nothing else, for solidarity and to rebalance our thinking. During the course of the discussion that night, we realised that we needed to cooperate in some way.

But how? Cooperation does not happen in a vacuum. At this point Eddie Lim of Thryft suggested that we could pool our inventories together and sell books on a bespoke e-commerce platform. Each bookshop would still showcase their curation — in all their wonderfully idiosyncratic choices. The books we sell would not be anonymised like on other platforms; readers would know that this book is from the hand of a bookseller from that bookshop. And just like that, the idea for Bookshop.SG was born.

Upon reflection, I see that this is an act of radical cooperation, meaning that our fundamental motivation is at root (radix), cooperation not competition. On that December evening, we thought of Bookshop.SG as a first project to work on, intuiting that perhaps there would be more initiatives to come. It is my hope that we may come up with other ambitious projects that restore in public consciousness the value of physical bookshops as treasured spaces of unique sociability that booksellers create around, for, and through reading. After all, the spaces we make of our bookshops feel more like living rooms than emporiums. If readers are still crossing our thresholds and encountering our books, we booksellers, inshaAllah, will keep the lights on for them.

Ibrahim Tahir
Bookseller, Wardah Books