(He's still alive and kicking. I bought a secondhand book from a random eBay seller the other year and it turned out to be him. Quite a shock.)
That aside: I find it hard to believe the assertion that "the number of second-hand bookshops in the UK had increased by about 25% over a thirty year period". All the areas with which I'm particularly familiar saw a notable decline in this period (some almost precipitous, such as Oxford or Uppingham). My gut feeling is that Driff's 80s guides were not as comprehensive as the poster believes, and that the advent of the internet has made it much easier to compile complete, crowdsourced directories such as thebookguide.info.
I suspect this may be part of the case; though doesn't the UK have some master list of companies? Maybe that could be searched.
In my local experience in the US Barnes and Noble and Borders killed all the non-second-hand bookstores, and then Amazon mostly killed those, but some of the second hand bookstores have survived.
Also, do you count Goodwill as a "second hand bookstore"? They have usually two or three aisles of books, after all.
It returned 3,437 results for me, but this will include inactive companies and chains, and exclude unincorporated shops. Tax records might be more thorough, if there are a lot of unincorporated companies or sole traders that file tax returns, but I don't think those records are public.
Comments
For those unaware of "Driff": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driff_Field
(He's still alive and kicking. I bought a secondhand book from a random eBay seller the other year and it turned out to be him. Quite a shock.)
That aside: I find it hard to believe the assertion that "the number of second-hand bookshops in the UK had increased by about 25% over a thirty year period". All the areas with which I'm particularly familiar saw a notable decline in this period (some almost precipitous, such as Oxford or Uppingham). My gut feeling is that Driff's 80s guides were not as comprehensive as the poster believes, and that the advent of the internet has made it much easier to compile complete, crowdsourced directories such as thebookguide.info.
I suspect this may be part of the case; though doesn't the UK have some master list of companies? Maybe that could be searched.
In my local experience in the US Barnes and Noble and Borders killed all the non-second-hand bookstores, and then Amazon mostly killed those, but some of the second hand bookstores have survived.
Also, do you count Goodwill as a "second hand bookstore"? They have usually two or three aisles of books, after all.
Companies House has a publicly searchable list of incorporated companies:
https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/
The Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) code for "retail sale of books in specialised stores" is 47610:
https://resources.companieshouse.gov.uk/sic/
You can search the list by "nature of business" (i.e. SIC code):
https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/a...
It returned 3,437 results for me, but this will include inactive companies and chains, and exclude unincorporated shops. Tax records might be more thorough, if there are a lot of unincorporated companies or sole traders that file tax returns, but I don't think those records are public.