How Bill’s Dingwall bookshop took flight after he was made redundant twice

Bill Anderson says owning a bookshop may have been a subconscious dream years before he actually did so.

He bought a book with his first ever paycheque, and has bought a book a day ever since, “probably more than one,” he confesses.

Bill owns Highflight second-hand bookshop on Dingwall High Street. He’s been there for 13 years, but as he doesn’t like the number 13, he calls it 14 years.

He opened the shop after being made redundant twice: “I kind of got the message,” he says in typically droll fashion.

Bill was a community youth worker and a manager for the Prince’s Trust, Highlands.

It’s clear he still has a lot of time for young people, pleased that they still find a place for print in their lives.

“I have a lot of younger customers coming in all the time, very bright young things with a project or looking for a read.”

He gives the impression he just bumbled his way into the second-hand bookshop scene without much of a plan.

If so, it works as the shop is a welcoming space, lined with books and curiosities, pleasing to the eye.

To get started, Bill picked up 200 old scaffolding boards that had been lying in a yard for about 20 years, and had a local joiner shelve the walls of his unit at 2, High Street with them.

“We had to dry them out. Some of them were like sponges, you could squeeze them and water would come out.”

Obsessed with aviation from a young age, Bill had built up a huge library of aviation books and started his business around them.

“Obviously not everybody’s going to appreciate that,” he observes.

Where did the name Highflight come from?

He chose the name Highflight for his shop in recognition of the poem High Flight by John Gillespie Magee Jnr, a Royal Canadian Air Force pilot killed aged just 19 in an accidental mid-air collision in his Spitfire over England during World War II.

Bill still has a large selection of aviation books in the shop along with plenty for railway and bus buffs, all presided over at the back of the shop by a full size mannequin sporting an RAF Air Electronics Officer fly suit from around 1950.

Bill launches into off into an expert explanation.

“You can see the suit has the winged AO brevet worn by officers on the left hand breast of their flying suit and dress uniform.

“This was awarded to officers from 1957 to the late sixties for aircrew with specialist electronic expertise on aircraft of that era including maritime reconnaissance aircraft like the Avro Shackleton and bomber aircraft such as the Vulcan, Valiant, Victor.”

Rolls Royce of bookshops

Bill’s reputation for aviation books precedes him and attracts some surprise visitors.

He said: “I had one of the managers of Rolls Royce in the other month, and he bought a book on Rolls Royce engines.

“I also sold a book on the Lockheed F104 Starfighter to someone from the Spanish Air Force.

“I was a little bit alarmed that they wanted a book on how to operate Starfighters, a fighter jet which has been out of commission for a number of years, but yes, I had it.”

Bill has built up a wide range of books over the years and never knows what the next customer through the door will ask for.

“I get asked for all sorts, across the range of subjects, fiction, a lot of the contemporary authors plus not so contemporary, Robert Louis Stevenson, Dickens, they’re always in demand.

“Someone was looking for a book on mushrooms the other day.”

Being able to lean over and pick up just the very book someone has come in and asked for is one of the most satisfying aspects of the job.

Bill said: “I did that once with a book which I found and handed over to the person looking for it. It turned out the person was the author of the book, and it was a signed copy. They were quite pleased with that.”

So how does Bill come by the books for his shop?

He says: “I find my books wherever people are, I don’t normally go on the hunt for them.

“I sometimes get asked to look for a book, so that might involve a little bit of a hunt through the internet.

“But if I’m out and about in Edinburgh or Glasgow, I’m usually in the bookshops there so I’ll scoop up some books which either catch my eye or I think will be of interest to folk.

“And there’s an endless supply of personal libraries that people are wanting to downsize or look to finding another home for, so I have the pick of a whole range of things.

“Sometimes I buy a single book, sometimes I buy a whole library.”

That was how Bill came to buy a huge collection of sci-fi/fantasy books, not normally his thing.

He said: “There’s a former hotel, now a private house, just above Carbisdale Castle on a wee track.

“I went all the way out there and discovered the owner was a collector of science fiction books, so they had rooms full of sci-fi and fantasy.

“It was an extraordinary collection so I bought the whole lot.

“It’s something I don’t normally keep in the shop but it was a great collection so I just bought it all.”

Similarly, Bill once came by a 10-volume set of books about Chinese science and society.

Not much call for that in Dingwall, but then the owner of the Edinburgh Bookshop came in and snapped up the lot.

Bill’s also amazed that customers will spend £100 on a book these days, whereas when he first started, he was amazed that they’d spend £5 or £10.

“That’s my development in the book trade,” he says.

Bill has absolute confidence that print will endure for a very long time.

“It’s been around for thousands of years, since papyrus,” he points out.

Fully entering the digital world is something “I’ll get around to some time,” he says.

“I see no point in having a shop and then selling online.

“My customers are very loyal and come back every year. I can almost work out when they’ll walk through the door.”

[Source: Press and Journal]