The Marlow Bookshop celebrated Independent Book Week in style as they recently won the Muddy Stilettos award for Best Book Shop in Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire.

The Muddy Stilettos Awards celebrates the many local and privately-owned businesses across the UK, with the people of Marlow showing their support to the Spittal Street store, as they won the bookshop category.

And despite only being open for three years and having a team of five part-time managers co-run the business, the shop has a wide range of books which vary from children’s picture books to autobiographies and history novels.

The shop is also animal friendly, is laid out in a way which caters to different genres and has a section which specifically aims for children and toddlers.

Rae Constable, one of the co-runners of the shop told the Bucks Free Press: “There have been many occasions where we have had children bouncing against the windows ready to come in to see if their favourite book is in, and they’ve cheered when they have entered.

“People come in and say, ‘this is my son’s favourite shop. He wants to come in every time we walk past!’ Or when a child asks for a new book or when they ask us to help them find stuff by their favourite author, it’s just lovely to see.

“We have pop up and visual books for children and after they’ve read one, they want to read another.

“I think there’s nothing like it. It makes you feel very shiny.

The Marlow Book Shop opened in July 2016 and with well over 1,000 books on show, Rae admitted that it would be impossible to know every single title they have in their shop.

However, she did reveal two of the most popular books that have been bought in their shop, and they were Gail Honeyman’s Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine (fiction) and Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens a Brief History of Humankind (non-fiction).

And despite the technological advanced world we currently live in, Rae is confident that hard copy of books will edge out online copies.

She said: “I think that reading a book on a Kindle is an efficient thing to do especially when you’re travelling as you don’t want too much to carry.

“But if you want the whole experience of reading a book, such as going through its pages, smelling the print, feeling the quality of the paper and seeing the cover of the book in person, reading an actual book can really get a person involved.

“I think there is a place for both of them but obviously I’m passionate and I’m a champion for books.”

Rae attended the Muddy Stilettos Award ceremony at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford on June 19 and met all the other winners from Bucks and Oxon.

Visit www.marlowbookshop.co.uk.