Today’s Guardian book blog has a post about how the London Review Bookshop has managed to succeed in a commercial environment that has seen other independent bookstores closing all over the place. It is written by someone involved in managing the store, and is pretty self-congratulatory in places, but this bit in particular rang true:

More than anything, the LRB shop’s defining achievement of the last five years, if I may modestly boast, has been the events programme. It has established the shop as a place where literary and political debate can flourish week after week, with American, European and Arabic writers and commentators, as well as British. We have held over 250 such evenings, and very labour-intensive they are too…

That (as Mr. Punch so famously said) is the way to do it.