Jon Richardson is tied here to a harder question than sales: what happens when a children’s brand loses trust in the aisle? Families and retailers are removing David Walliams books after a joint Guardian and ITV News investigation alleged he used his position to pursue young women and girls for sex, including girls as young as 15.
Retailers sold 7,497 David Walliams books over the past four weeks, worth £48,400, according to NielsenIQ BookData figures reported by The Bookseller. That is far below the 102,000 books sold in the same period last year when he had a new book out, and it leaves almost 108,000 copies sold so far this year, worth more than £702,000.
Waterstones and HarperCollins
Waterstones said it was talking to HarperCollins about returning the small number of copies that remain in stock in a few of its shops. HarperCollins stopped publishing new David Walliams books last December and dropped his entire backlist in September, so the retail issue is now about clearing residual stock rather than pushing fresh supply into the market.
That matters because the pullback is not starting from zero. David Walliams titles have made more than £153m since 2008, so even a shrinking live market still carries weight for bookshops deciding whether to keep them on the shelf.
Shops that already moved
Helen Tamblyn-Saville stopped stocking David Walliams books in 2020, Griffin Books dropped them about 18 months ago, and The Chicken and Frog bookshop has not stocked them for a decade. Urmi said Pickled Pepper Books chose not to stock them at least five years ago after hearing rumours about him.
The Works said it had removed all David Walliams titles from sale, while TG Jones said it no longer sold his books in store or online. Those moves show the latest reports landed on a market that was already fragmenting around him, rather than one that was broadly unified.
Sarah in west London
Sarah, a parent in west London, said her children, aged eight, six and four, had dressed up as David Walliams characters for World Book Day. “I’ll probably take them away and replace them with other authors,” she said, adding that she would do it sooner rather than later so her children do not realise.
Walliams denies the allegations, and that denial sits alongside a separate complication: some shops say they had already stopped stocking his books long before the latest reports. The current fallout is less about a single boycott than a wider reassessment of whether his titles should stay visible at all.
