Entertainment

This bookshop tweeted it was 'seriously skint' and what happened next is amazing

The Big Green Bookshop in north London said it had “six days to pay bills”.
The Big Green Bookshop in north London said it had “six days to pay bills”. The Big Green Bookshop in north London said it had “six days to pay bills”.

A bookshop which asked its Twitter followers to help it “pay the bills” has been flooded with orders.

Simon Key and Tim West opened the Big Green Bookshop in Wood Green, north London, in 2008, but on Sunday they wrote on Twitter that they were “seriously skint” and had six days to pay the bills.

They asked their Twitter followers to help them by buying some books and their request quickly went viral, resulting in what the owners call the best day they’ve ever had at the shop.

“It’s absolutely fantastic that people have been buying lots and lots of books so we are extraordinarily grateful,” said West. “We’re not in desperate measures, we’ve just got to the end of the month and realised that we have bills to pay.”

ICYMI, this isn’t the first time Big Green Bookshop has become Twitter famous. Earlier this year owner Key started tweeting Piers Morgan every line of Harry Potter And The Philosopher’s Stone after Morgan got involved in an argument with Potter author JK Rowling.She initially tweeted about how much she’d enjoyed seeing him derided on American TV in a debate about Donald Trump and Morgan responded saying he’d never read a word of Harry Potter.

Since their tweet on Sunday, West said there has been a definite uplift in the number of people through the door of Big Green Bookshop as well as in their online book sales.

“The biggest amount of orders have been on Twitter by far and then we do have our website and people have visited that a lot more recently,” he said.

“And I guess the next biggest sort of thing is subscriptions to our book clubs.”People have been reacting to the tweet by inquiring about certain reads they’ve been looking for.

And as an incentive to help the store out, one author offered to name a character after anyone who bought a copy of her book from Big Green Bookshop, while another offered to send a signed bookplate to people who bought his.

Meanwhile, Key said it would be “great if Piers would buy some books”, adding that the broadcaster took being tweeted the lines from the Harry Potter book in “good stead” – although he is now blocked from tweeting him.

“Yes, it would be great if Piers tweeted,” Key said. “It would be great if JK Rowling tweeted, that would be lovely. You know, I don’t expect anything, anything that’s happened off of the tweet I sent is a massive bonus.

“But yeah, I might nudge someone to tweet him (Piers) on my behalf, that would be fine. But we’ll see.”