To know more about our catalogue we recommend you to pass by our bookstore where you can find books and authors for all kind of children, teenagers and young adults. New books are arriving every day, so who knows what you are going to find in the next visit?
A multilingual bookshop for children in Brussels
The first challenge, for a multilingual bookshop was, how many languages? Children in Brussels speak all the languages!! And very often they speak more than one language!! After different discussions with other parents, and booksellers, we settled into something that should still be manageable, seven languages, and that we more or less understand, otherwise it becomes very difficult to select the books, order them, add them to the database, etc… So the languages we selected were French, Dutch, English, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish, based also on the population around Ixelles and Brussels.
Then, as a small independent children’s bookshop, it is not possible to have everything, so a selection needs to be done. Our idea is to cover from baby books to novels that you can read when you are a teenager. We wanted to cover also the classics, from Jules Verne to Beatrix Potter, but also newer themes, including the multicultural society that we live in, in Brussels.
We pay attention to the values in the books, to the illustrations, the cultural and local component, the nice editions, etc… so we work a bit differently to other bookshops, not bringing the latest books and changing them all the time, we try to keep a consistency and quality no matter if the book was published 3 years ago. It is not always possible, books go out of stock, they don’t get printed again, but we try find them in all those languages. We try as well to offer children’s books that are very well known and loved in some countries to others, as sometimes they are also translated, but that is a bit challenging for smaller authors and editions. We are willing to learn more about children’s literature and make our selection of children’s books bigger, so we are always happy to hear about your favourites, come and talk to us.
For now we don’t have an online bookshop, but we are happy to order children’s books for you in French, Dutch, English, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish, get in touch with us to see what we can do for you.
Making the bookselling business greener
We are trying as well to be as green as possible, with little initiatives like “circular bags” so we don’t order new bags to pack our books, but our customers and friends, bring us used bags to re-use when someone needs an extra bag to take all the books they have bought home. Our first idea is always to reuse what we have, so same with the cardboard boxes where the books travel, we are happy to share them with the customers that need them or if not, recycle them.
Some of our books arrive to Bimbi Books by bicycle from the warehouses, so we encourage our suppliers to choose that mode of delivery where possible, to avoid shipping vans in the neighbourhood. In the same line of action, we try to do fewer bigger orders instead of more frequent smaller orders, that reduces shipping emissions for very small packages.
We are also trying to reduce the number of returns as a bookshop to the wholesalers, with the objective of having less shipping emissions. So instead of bringing new books every other day, we try to keep our stock alive and show it to our customers properly so someone can buy it.
We only print tickets on demand and try to keep our administration zero-paper, we just like books to be in paper (recycled where possible!). Do you have any other ideas on how to make our children’s bookshop greener? Please get in touch with us and share it!
If you want to know more about our kid’s activities, please follow the link.