‘Mum this is me!’: the pop-up bookshop that only sells diverse children's books

#ReadTheOnePercent, run by publisher Knights Of, has reopened in south London for Christmas – and after selling out its stock, is now crowdfunding to become permanent

When Aimée Felone and David Stevens opened their pop-up children’s bookshop in Brixton in October, featuring only books with black, Asian or minority ethnic (BAME) protagonists, they had one reaction they weren’t prepared for: a customer burst into tears. “I went and asked her if she was OK,” says Stevens. “She said she’d never seen anything quite like it, she’d picked up six books in a row and they all had brown faces on. All I could say was, ‘I’m sorry it took so long.’”

Felone and Stevens, who have just launched a crowdfunding campaign to open a handful of inclusive pop-up bookshops around the UK and Ireland, aren’t usually in the retail business: they’re independent publishers. They decided to open their #ReadTheOnePercent shop in response to a damning report from the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education (CLPE), which found that of more than 9,000 children’s books published in the UK in 2017, just 1% had a BAME main character.

Related: Only 1% of children's books have BAME main characters – UK study

Continue reading...