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Our

Shop

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A message from Orb's founders - Annie and John Lamb.

"In the days when computers could be built at home, and sold for a modest profit, we created Orb Computer Systems. The name ‘Orb’ is a contraction of Ourobouros, shrunk to fit on a one-inch-square computer-case badge.


In 2001, we rented the shop in Deveron Street, intending to open a centre for IT training. For this we needed to build a few machines, and we couldn’t afford to. Yet there was the shop. So we filled it with books, and at the end of April we began trading.


The bookshop didn’t make money, but at first the sales of computers supported it. After we gave up building them, we landed a part-time job. This paid the shop’s bills for the next few years. All too soon, retirement loomed: with no salary, how could we run the shop? Our friends from Huntly Writers stepped in, became volunteers and saved the whole enterprise. Wonderful!"
 

 

The next chapter began...

 

In 2013 Huntly Writers were granted funds from the Huntly Cultural Fund to conduct a feasibility study to determine the viability of transforming Orb’s Bookshop into a not-for-profit community bookstore.

A feisty group of volunteers put those findings into action and, to date, the bookshop has remained open since 2013 run and managed entirely by the community.

The bookshop is open six days a week and is run and managed entirely by volunteers. We work hard to keep this bookshop open, and all profits go back into the bookshop and into community projects.

In 2021 we moved to a new premises at 10 ½ The Square, Huntly (in the pic below), and another chapter begins in our new shop. We battled through Covid restrictions and kept books flowing through our community by click and collect and free home deliveries. We even managed to move premises under Covid restrictions and somehow our thousands of books made their way to their new home!

We are all dedicated to boosting and nurturing a love of reading, and we want to continue to share our passion for books with the community, and the rest of the world!

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Where it all began

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