There are some ideas so self-evidently bad that as you see the seeds being sown, it’s all you can do to restrain yourself from staging an intervention. So it was with Bad Girl Books, which earlier this year announced plans to open a short distance away from Oxford’s city centre with a pastel-pink storefront and a focus on the romantasy genre. (I am no expert, but imagine that on every other page of The Lord of the Rings someone’s heart was pounding at the sight of a smouldering elven bad boy, and you won’t be too far wrong.)
It was not the colour scheme that worried me, nor even the narrow-seeming niche, but the fact that Oxford is blessed with so many bookshops already. On the 15-minute stroll from Bad Girl Books to the Oxford institution Blackwell’s, the bibliophile risks being distracted by The Last Bookshop, an Oxfam second-hand shop, The Last Bookshop (another one — surely they can’t both be the last one?), and the Blackwell’s science-fiction, manga and games branch, heaving with its own lavish selection of romantasy titles.
Attempting to avoid all that will only lead you into a capacious Waterstones, another Oxfam bookshop and the independent bookshop-café Gulp Fiction. Flee to Oxford’s northern district of Summertown and you may fall into the gravity well of a generously proportioned branch of Daunt Books. And all that is before we mention the elephantine online competitor, Amazon.
I note all this not to prompt tears of rage and envy if you are reading this in a book desert, but to point out that Bad Girl Books was clearly doomed from the start to be a vanity project that would drain the life savings of the naive proprietor Starlin Marot.
On opening day, however, customers were literally queuing down the street. On day two, customers were still queuing down the street. I left town for a couple of weeks, and when I returned, things were different: the queue management system had improved, and the line now stretched down a side street.
It turns out that authors of books such as Death’s New Pet, Heavensent & Hellbent, Web of Vows and Vengeance and A Kiss of Hammer and Flame have been showing up each summer weekend to participate in a Mini Summer Romantasy Festival. Despite the heat, customers couldn’t get enough. Bad Girl Books was off to a flying start.
I am pleased to have been proved wrong. It is a delight to discover how many different enthusiasms exist in the world. I am not buying what Bad Girl Books is selling, but that is not the point: others are purring with satisfaction, and that’s good enough for me. (Also: like me, romantasy readers are nerds. It is great to see nerds well served.)
But there is a broader point here, too. If Oxford had a committee in charge of approving new bookshops, I would be overqualified to serve on it, being an author, book enthusiast and professional economist. And if I had been on that committee, I would have patiently, patronisingly explained that there was no business case for Bad Girl Books and the business plan should be rejected.
Thankfully there is no such committee, leaving the proprietor free to make her foolish decision — or to demonstrate that the decision was not so foolish after all. A thriving economy allows people to take their own risks, follow their own dreams and make their own mistakes.
Marot is not the first Oxford entrepreneur to be underestimated by an Oxford economist. William Morris began his business career running a bicycle-repair shop on High Street, before moving into the manufacture of automobiles. As ever-larger manufacturing plants were built in Cowley, east Oxford, the economic historian Edwin Cannan — who taught at the London School of Economics but lived in Oxford — was opining in 1927 that he could not imagine where the demand would come from.
I stumbled upon Cannan’s concerns in John Kay’s The Truth About Markets (2003), which suggests that a key feature of the market economy is missing from most economics textbooks. Those textbooks tend to describe an allocation mechanism where prices ensure that supply equals demand, and competitive pressure pushes those prices down to the point where they equal the cost of production. That description is not wholly wrong, but it leaves out a lot. For Kay, much of what a market economy does well can be described with the phrase “disciplined pluralism”.
By pluralism, he means that many different ideas can flourish. Pluralism is vital in a world where the right way forward is never obvious. There is no committee of experts to decide whether Marot should be able to launch yet another bookshop, or whether a bicycle-repair boy will ever find enough customers for his newfangled motor cars.
More precisely, no committee of experts has veto power. A new start-up, whether the product is romantasy books or bicycles, will probably have to convince somebody — a family member, a bank manager, a group of enthusiastic backers on Kickstarter — to risk some cash. But a well-functioning economy will offer many such options to many budding entrepreneurs, even if it does not offer limitless funding to everyone.
This is no mere theoretical idea. IBM turned down the chance to fund Chester Carlson’s brainchild — the photocopier. No matter. In the end, Carlson found somebody willing to take a risk and the result was the Xerox Corporation. Many other projects, from Google to The Beatles, were rejected before finding a backer who mattered.
Pluralism sounds fun, but Kay also emphasises the importance of discipline. Pluralism means trying many ideas; discipline means closing down the ideas that do not work before they consume too many resources. Evolution by natural selection achieves pluralism through the mixing and mutation of genes, and discipline through the brutal process of survival of the fittest.
A market economy achieves pluralism through rules and laws that do not forbid new businesses, along with a financial system that funds a variety of them. It achieves discipline through competition and, sometimes, the bankruptcy courts. No matter how much your financial backers like your business idea, it will not last long if it does not also appeal to some customers. An investment bubble can loosen the discipline and postpone the reckoning, but not for ever.
At a time when the performance of the British economy leaves a lot to be desired, policymakers should keep the idea of disciplined pluralism in mind. In a healthy economy, there must be ways for new business ideas to be born — and for failing ideas to die.
Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 2 Sep 2026.
I’m running the Oxford Half Marathon in October in support of a very good cause and in memory of my mother. If you felt able to contribute something, I’d be extremely grateful.
