CHRONICLE readers have raised more than £25,000 in just one month to help secure the future of Dartmouth's new community bookshop.

Scores of people living in the town and surrounding area have invested cash in the town's new Winnie- the-Pooh bookshop following and all-important share issue.

The shop is now more than halfway to its £50,000 target which is needs to accomplish its three priorities:

* Improve the shop premises – either where it is now in Higher Street or new premises.

* Increase the stock of books on offer.

* Develop an outreach programme for the

shop which would involve local schools.

Dartmouth Community Bookshop chairman Tony Fyson said: 'To be honest we did not know what to expect. I was hopeful because we had a lot of expressions of support and now a lot of people are turning those expressions into real support.

'I do get the impression that people genuinely want to keep the bookshop in this town among the booklovers and those people who recognise that a bookshop is an important element in a town's shopping offer.

'All the towns around have bookshops and we don't want people going of to buy books and doing the rest of their shopping while they are there.'

The opening the new bookshop at the beginning of December was the culmination of a major campaign to save the town's unique bookshop links with Winnie-the-Pooh.

The original Harbour Bookshop was opened 60 years ago by Christopher Milne – the basis for his father's Christopher Robin character in the Pooh stories.

A community bookshop team – which grew out of the Dartmouth and Kingswear Society – managed to buy up the fittings from the Harbour Bookshop in Fairfax Place following its closure and they are currently installed in the Higher Street premises which are on loan from the Dartmouth Trust charity.

The bookshop bosses had given themselves two months to reach their £50,000 share issue target.

Mr Fyson said the majority of the share buyers are from Dartmouth or the surrounding area. 'They are local people,' he stressed.

He said the cash was needed to improve the bookshop premises – wherever that may be in the end – although he said that negotiations were ongoing over a lease with the current landlords.

He said that at the moment the stock at the new bookshop was only around a quarter of that which was held by the old Harbour Bookshop and that also needs to be improved.

'We also want to develop an outreach programme. The idea is that the bookshop should become more than just a bookshop, with wider services,' he said.

'We want to explore the possibilities of developing literary services for the wider community as well as relating our stocking policy to events going on locally.

'For example, we would stock the relevant Shakespeare play when the Shakespeare festival is going on.'