The Forest Bookshop - About Forest

The Forest Bookshop

Doug McLean started the Forest Bookshop in Coleford, in Gloucestershire’s Forest of Dean, 25 years ago. This was after years of experience first as a London bookseller, and later in mass-market publishing.

The Forest Bookshop soon developed into a busy bookshop serving the Forest of Dean. But it was when he met his wife Lyn, who worked within the Deaf community and with deaf family, that he became interested in deaf issues. He started a course in British Sign Language and also joined the Open University ‘Issues In Deafness’ course.

He then discovered that many essential books and materials were hard to obtain. As a bookseller, he produced a small catalogue of a dozen or so titles, to share with fellow students. News spread and requests came for more and more catalogues. Doug and Lyn watched with amazement as the service grew and it became clear that this was a much-needed service. It was also a powerful way to raise deaf awareness and provide deaf people, their families and all who work with them with easy access to the best resources.

From the beginning, The Forest Bookshop set high standard for customer service by ensuring that all orders were dealt with the day they were received from the customer and by providing a service that was as close to a friendly neighborhood bookshop as possible.

Today, Forest employs over 20 staff (both deaf and hearing) and the deaf service is now run from a warehouse and offices outside Coleford. All staff are encouraged to go on Sign language courses to at least CACDP stage 2 level and all telephones have access to minicoms. Three ISDN videophones are in service for the growing number of Deaf people and businesses communicating this way. Over 120,000 copies of their free 64 page full colour Deafness and Deaf Issues catalogue are printed distributed every year. Forest displays and meets their customers at over 50 deaf related conferences and meetings annually and a steady stream of visitors come to the warehouses from all over Britain and the world.

The service provided by Forest is unique and much of their success and popularity comes from the continuing policy of re-investing al profits into providing the best service possible and of course, the dedicated and enthusiastic award winning Forest team.