Sometimes you build up to a significant anniversary over months, maybe even years, with trepidation or excitment, always aware that it's looming there, on the horizon. In our case it seemed to suddenly just arrive! We'd barely noticed, and then 2025 arrived with the sudden realization that this marked the start of a fifth decade selling books. Where on Earth did all that time go?
The eponymous Simon Lewis Transport Books came into being when Simon was eighteen years and one month old. There were reasons. One was continued unemployment after dropping out of college the previous summer. This was the Broken Britain of the mid-eighties (we have been there before you see) , where in the aftermath of the bitter miners' strike, businesses and jobs were still vanishing at an alarming rate and we had yet to experience the brief ‘economic miracle’ brought about by Thatcherism. The second was the government's new Enterprise Allowance Sceme. This gave anyone starting up a new businesses the princely sum of £40 per week for the first year to help make ends meet. But you had to be over the age of eighteen in order to qualify. Hence the start date.
But the real catalyst was a visit in November 1984 to Terry Wills - a prominent dealer in motoring books. It lead to an “I could do that!” moment. The fact Terry was actually an accountant during the week and a bookseller on-the-side didn't really register at the time. And so, with just the tiniest bit of help from the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Simon Lewis Transport Books was built on a mix of desperation and delusion. Sometimes it feels exactly that way now!
Things always seemed to work for us in five year cycles. The first of those was spent doing the rounds at classic car events, steam rallies and autojumble with an old-fashioned market stalls, first with an estate car stuffed with books and then later, a Transit van. Which could be stuffed with even more books. It was a proper family business at this point, with Simon, brother Ashley, mum, dad, and friends, all attending events and manning the stall. Views on how much fun this was was depended on whether you saw it as a weekend away among old vehicles and friendly people (mum and dad), a nuisance that vacuumed up all your free time (Ashley), or the desperately serious only-way of earning a crust (Simon).
Then that whole events ‘scene’ took a right nose dive in the early 1990s when the economy fell through the floor (again…) . Classic cars, which had been booming in price until then, tanked almost overnight, and events like the Beaulieu Autojumble, which had seen us double our takings year on year, now saw them falling by half in the exact same fashion. The laws on sunday trading in Britain had also been changed and people now had supermarkets, garden centres and DIY superstores to visit on a day of the week when formerly very little was open unless it was an ‘event’ of some kind. That had a vast and very negative effect on attendences and takings . Mail order however, was taking off, and this is what underpinned our next half a decade.
During this time, we found ourselves issuing increasingly large and elaborate quarterly catalogues. These went out in the post all over the world, and in turn, brought back orders by letter, with accompanying cheques for payment. Simon seemed to spend half the week queued up in one or other high street bank (remember those?) waiting to pay them in… Or could it really have been that he fancied one of the girls behind the counter?
We printed all these catalogues ourselves, using a big clunky RONEO type machine that churned out one single page for every turn of the handle. These then required sorting into individual piles prior to being collated and stapled - all very labour intensive. It took a while before a photocopier became a more economic option, and even when we acquired one of those, it still cost us about £500 a year to rent. It also worked out at a penny per page in maintenence fees, because it was always breaking down. We ended up being on first name terms with the mobile engineers - who seemed to be calling by every couple of days to rectify yet another problem. It would all be so much easier and cheaper these days, what with a PC, desktop publishing software and a laser printer.
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It was around about this time that we moved into our first shop (above). The place was tiny, it was freezing cold, and it was only really used as a store room, where customers could come and look around by prior arrangement. All the office work was still done from home, with parcels packed on the kitchen table, and the photocopier occupying the entire box room. A larger shop quickly followed suit (below).
Then in late 1994, we moved into the shop that most people remember - by the docks at Lydney. And this became the next chapter, more or less. For those five years it worked well; we boomed and took on staff. At one point there were four of us working in the shop, including Simon's mum - still involved in the business today, and his favourte PA, Samantha ('Call me Sam'). Sam was only with us for two short years but she was enormously entertaining to work with; quiet afternoons could rapidly descend into chaotic rounds of practical jokes. We also had a exercise bike in the office (who doesn't?), and Sam would routinely eat her lunch whilst pedalling away furiously like a cyclist in the Tour de France. The photo below was taken on her last day at work and, too many years on to politely remember, she still remains a good friend.
We were quite go-ahead back then, accepting plastic when it was more common to pay by cheque or postal order, and our first website went live in 1996, when the World Wide Web was still largely the preserve of undergraduate students and technogeeks. We also started trading on this newfangled thing called eBay. By this point, doing events on weekends had vanished from the business plan. Not only were they becoming uneconomic, they also rather got in the way of Simon's developing motor sport career (as you can see from the shop photos above and below!) . Four seasons of rallying was followed by eight years of circuit racing. Simon also tried his hand at other motoring disciplines; hillclimbs, sprints, autograss, 4WD trialling and even sand racing in the Channel Islands. This all came to a halt after a few too many accidents, one of which left him with a fractured vertebra in his neck. Alarmingly, this wasn't picked up until many years later.
At the same time the shop suffered a break-in , which made a mess and cost us quite a bit of stock. We also disagreed with the landlord over a new lease. This, when coupled with the upward curve of the web-based business, made it clear that bricks-and-mortar premises were no longer quite the necessity they had once been. It was the right time to move on, which we did, sticking to the mail order side of the business and working out of storage units. But we really missed the day-to-day human interaction that having the shop brought us. And we also missed things like ex Le Mans and F1 racer Robin Smith turning up in a Ferrari F40, or the time prominent vintage racer Julian Bronson parked a supercharged Riley special right outside our door.
By the late noughties, and after more than twenty years in the trade, the world around us had changed completely from when we'd started out. The internet and e-commerce had become the keystone of the business; mail-order was now e-mail-order, and our elaborate quarterly catalogues had long since vanished into obsolescence. Active motor sport, which had initially been subject to a temporary hiatus, somehow managed to remain on the back burner for sixteen years. But that left weekends free for Simon to go back out with the van and sell at events once again - this time with his now trademark Aussie bush hat to keep the top of an increasingly bald head warm!
A regular clientele of collectors and enthusiasts patronized the stand at the two major local hillclimb venues of Prescott and Shelsley Walsh, and Simon now had two teenage daughters, both of whom now helped carry the family flag at events (Georgina & Charlotte on the stand at Prescott, below)…
And then in 2020, the Covid pandemic suddenly brought normal everyday life to a grinding halt. Amid all the various lockdowns, restriction and social bubbles, business boomed. We did very well from people buying books and memorabilia in order to help fend off the boredom of having nowhere to go and nothing to do.
Post Covid, we found that the world had lurched off in a different direction yet again. A spiraling cost-of-living crisis and an increasing culture of watching ‘live streaming’ of events rather than actually going along in person, meant that spectator numbers at events were in decline. And so we were back to relying on eBay and the website, as well as Amazon and the growing ABEBooks platform. It's now more a case of running a stand to keep ‘the brand’ in sight and remind people that we survived Covid, as opposed to it contributing towards the profit margins. But our presence at various events continues to fill the gaps left by the shop when it comes to connecting names with faces. You would be amazed how many people we know by sight from events and by name from mail order, yet we've only matched them up after many years!
Sometimes though, there are other benefits to being at events…
And suddenly, here we are with a business turning 40. It's been more than two decades since we had an actual shop and time, it seems, has simply flown by. But a recent look at a TV documentary filmed locally in the mid 1980s - not long after the business was established - reminded us of just how different things were when we started. It was a time where the internet and mobile phones were still the preserve of the BBC's "Tomorrow's World", the only EV in town was the milk float delivering your daily pint, when chimneys still smoked and red telephone boxes still had actual working phones in them. It all confirmed just how much water has gone under the bridge in those intervening years. Because time seems to move at two speeds, you see. On the one hand you cannot believe it's quite so late in the day, and on the other, you wonder how the heck you've managed to cram so much into those forty years!
So will Simon be retiring soon? Are you kidding? He says he can't afford to, and he also says he'd be bored rigid in no time if he did. As a business Simon Lewis Transport Books may not have been listed on the stock market, nor enabled us to relocate in a tax haven on the proceeds, but at least it's been better than working….
