At Hunting Raven Books a key person working at the important centre of operations is our Gap Year Student.
This year, our gap year student from August 2010 to June 2011 was Hettie.
These are Hettie’s words writing of her experiences working with us.

“I’ve not got Tom’s sense of humour thus this may seem a little dry…so apologies in advance (but I am polite see!)

There’s a great team at Hunting Raven and I really enjoyed being a part of it, it’s a friendly, comfortable environment to work in where the opinions of the individual are valued. Most of the customers are friendly too! As someone filling the gap year position you do bits of everything from unpacking and shelving to dressing up as dragons, so there’s room for a laugh as well as serious work.

I’d say the best part of the job is when you really get to grips with the computer systems and where everything in the shop is. There’s nothing better than being able to answer a question or source a particular book for a customer when all you have to go on is ‘”I think the author’s name begins with ‘M’ or maybe an ‘N’ …it’s about cats”.

Missing everyone already!”

Hettie has now left Frome to live in Plymouth and we wish her well – and we miss her too!

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Working at the vitally important nerve centre of operations is our Gap Year Student.
Tom became that most important Vital Cog In The Machine that drives the shop – a role which he took most seriously.

Tom was our gap year student from August 2009 to August 2010 and wrote of his experiences working at Hunting Raven Books.

In Tom’s own words:

” I worked in two places before Hunting Raven, and this job was the only one of the three I was sad to leave. And believe me, the other two jobs weren’t bad.  No, really they weren’t.

Since the gap year student works five days in the week, I was one of the more continuously present Raven people (I’m not going to say “staff members”, its impersonal and rubbish). Not only did this mean I gradually got to know everyone else in the shop very well (and dare I say it, became rather fond of them), but ended up providing a sense of continuity between days. (You’d sometimes have two completely different people manning the shop to the previous day, so you’d want that continuity, or the shop might collapse in flames or something).

Another fun aspect of the job was unpacking and shelving the books, simply because it meant I knew best where they all were. A lady would come in and ask Caroline, “Do you have Dancing Backwards by Sally Vickers?” Out I would leap from my hiding place, shouting  “We do indeed madam!  Happy to help!”  They really loved me, you know.

Anyway, to sum it up, it was the best job in the world, I rather miss it.   T B”

Tom has now left Frome to study at Sheffield University – and can be found occasionally back at HR in Uni breaks, so we haven’t completely lost him YET!