Maybe you already know that when you visit an independent bookshop, every single book on those shelves has been hand-picked by the bookseller. I presumed naively that there would be a ‘bookshop starter kit’, a list of books that you had to have — the Zadie Smiths and the Roald Dahls. The book suppliers all literally laughed at this question and so I learnt I was to choose every single book, all 1,500 titles. ‘It’s one of the best bits of the job,’ my bookshop consultant Aimée Madill told me. Madill of Phlox Books in Leyton, east London, has worked in books much of her life. I didn’t even know bookshop consultants existed and to be fair to Aimée, it’s a title I’ve given her. She was right, curating my own bookshop one book at a time, placing the new James Turrell retrospective in prime position or lining up the Booker Prize nominees has been a dream come true.