Sir Tim Waterstone, a businessman who built a bookshop empire, will talk about his memoir at this year's Dorchester Literary Festival. He talks to Jess Thompson about his childhood and the importance of bookstores.

"I’ve learnt through life the importance of love: familial love, but also love of people you don’t know very well - which leads to a happy staff"

I am struck, when talking to Sir Tim Waterstone, by how often he mentions love, and hugs, and adoring his children - he has eight, and he quotes the age of each child he mentions. It is, perhaps, indicative of his determination to break the patterns of his own childhood.

Born in Glasgow in 1939, he had a mother who was 'clearly very, very fond' of him, but a father who was cold, distant and openly disdainful. “I don’t know what it was, because with my older sister and brother he was very tactile. He just couldn’t manage it with me. A most extraordinary thing.” Later we return to the subject and he asks if I have children. “The compulsion as a parent to be tactile is overwhelming, isn’t it? To pick them up and hug them.”

His relationship with his father was something he’d barely acknowledged until he began writing his fascinating memoir, The Face Pressed Against a Window. Originally he’d wanted to write a family history, but the focus soon changed. “Within days I realised I was trying to write about my whole life. It was painful to write the early part, but I’m very, very glad I’ve done it. Everything came out; it was like a week of solid therapy.”

A particularly poignant story concerns his last meeting with his father, 10 years after his mother had died. “He telephoned me, for the first time ever – except for asking for money, which he did – suggesting we all meet for a family picnic. He had a new wife and we all sat around on a rug on Putney Heath and I could see that he was really trying to reach out to me, and that his wife, whom I’d barely met, was encouraging him. And he did try, and I tried too – and I thought that this was a thing we could make something of. But two weeks later he was dead. Very, very sudden.”

Such open talk of emotions is perhaps not what you might expect from a hugely successful entrepreneur, who says he would be, 'shedding crocodile tears' if he was to say he was sorry that the success of Waterstones saw scores of independent stores go out of business.

“We aimed, cheerfully, I have to say, at where we thought the independents were not doing a good enough job for their markets.” Although he’s equally keen to stress that when he started he too was an independent; self-financing the dream he’d had – almost as an epiphany – 20 years earlier, when standing in his university bookshop in Cambridge.

When I ask what makes a good independent he describes the bookshop which, fittingly, he can see from his window in West London. “It is an absolutely unbelievably successful place. It’s small. Packed with books. The people who work there are delightful and extremely knowledgeable. They know every customer they’ve got. The other day they rang asking if I was aware of a new history of the bible by an author they know I like. They’re unbeatable. And there are many other wonderful independents around the country."

There’s a charming old-fashioned side to him; almost a sense of innocence from a different age. Money isn’t something that drives him and he professes to being desperately romantic. “To the point of….” He tails off, then laughs. “I can’t acknowledge that more clearly.” Yet he also professes to always having been intrigued by loneliness. “I’m not a lonely man at all, but I can be quite solitary, which is very different.’ In his memoir he describes in detail the loneliness of people he’s known, like his former nanny, and I ask if it was one of the designing principles within his ground-breaking concept for Waterstones.

“I think that would be too self-aggrandising, if I was to say that I set up the bookstores to help combat loneliness,” he answers - showing a humbleness that’s evident throughout our conversation. “All I would say is that we just loved people coming into the stores and sitting down and reading, without necessarily buying. We particularly loved having conversations - I loved watching the staff do that. And, yes, a lot of those conversations were with very lonely people. When it really struck me was over the Christmas period – absolutely shattering. Then, it was certainly true that our shops were bursting with people – sitting there, reading, looking at each other, having somewhere to go.”

His memoir serves as a fascinating account of how he created one of the world’s most recognisable brands. I ask if he wrote it, in part, to record the “magic” of Waterstone’s DNA. ‘Yes, I did want to get the story down, for as decades go on it gets more and more lost.’

One of the reasons for his success was that he always had absolute clarity of vision. His key words were, ‘perfect stock, perfect staff, perfect control,’ and from the beginning he wanted to open stores as fast as he could. “The business model was unbelievably simple, but that added power to it because everyone understood it,” he recalls. When I ask about the speed, his answer is simple, “I just wanted to get it done as quickly as possible, before someone else did.”

I’m intrigued by how he managed to maintain quality control when going at such a rate - particularly as the model was heavily de-centralised – and his answer makes me laugh.

“Do you know, I wonder that sometimes. But we managed it. We made very few employment mistakes; at the start I interviewed everyone myself. And the wonderful thing is, the managers were so young and yet, because they were so enjoying the business, they were so responsible on the whole.”

I ask what he’s most proud of as a former employer and he pauses for a long time. ‘I think… no, I’m not going to get over-modest with this: I am proud of the fact that I gave dozens, hundreds, thousands - in the end - of young people the chance to really show what they could do with literary books, as well as giving them freedom and friendship. I love frankness and friendship in leadership, I really do. But also, I like, perhaps, clarity. Making sure that everyone knew what I wanted them to do, so they could just go off and do it.”

*Sir Tim Waterstone will be appearing at the Dorchester Literary Festival on Sunday, October 20, 1.30pm, Dorchester Corn Exchange. Tickets available on line, www.dorchesterliteraryfestival.com or from the Tourist Information Centre in Dorchester library. The Face Pressed Against the Window: A Memoir is published by Atlantic Books, priced £9.99