Christopher Hawtree
Acouple of years ago I found myself embroiled in a curious relationship with an American feminist which left me feeling exhausted. Before avid readers assume that I am about to indulge in a Bernardesque vein, I should add that we never met.
What happened was that one of the directors of a recently-established publish- ing house sought me out to revise a guide to London's bookshops which his firm had published two years earlier. Inspired by a well-known guide to the bookshops of New York, an American lady with the unlikely name of Martha Redding Pease had suc- cessfully produced a book which nobody in England had previously been enterprising enough to compile. Any profits in a re- vision would soon have been swallowed up by flying her back and providing a hotel for as long as the task required. And so it was that I was engaged for a sum which Weidenfeld spends on giving lunch to the caption-writer of picture-books but which was useful at the time.
To have confessed to this anonymous work is perhaps foolhardy. Who was it that found something to praise about the Poster-lined Sisterwrite in Upper Street? Was it really the same person that appears to keep a sharp look-out for the old World's Classics and has strewn the pages with pointers to the places that usually have a set of the Waverley novels in stock?
Such apparent schizophrenia on Martha Redding Pease's part is at least an indica- tion of the diverse shops which manage to survive in a London whose rating system appears to have been designed with the specific intention of driving out one of the few things that make the place tolerable. 'In the last twenty years many of the shops we used to know have disappeared', writes Sir Hugh Greene in his preface to Victorian Villainies. 'The old-fashioned bookshops With aged proprietors as dusty as their piles
of books have given way to shops with clean, well-arranged shelves presided over by bright young people who know their business. Bargains, once so easy to find, have become rare.'
One longs for those balmy days when the Charing Cross Road, intact and unsullied by burger bars with their spurious pastoral decor. was filled with second-hand book- shops whose owners regarded their stock as something more than a commodity with which to achieve a quick turnover. With the recent arrival of Henry Pordes from PInchley and Any Amount of Books from Hammersmith, the opening of Read's and the closing of Collet's, there are signs that things are looking up. Meanwhile Cecil Court, which runs into St Martin's Lane, is the closest that one can now find to a book- lined street — the excellent Green Knight Bookshop in nearby St Martin's Court, de- scribed by Ms Pease as `lovely, Dickensian- looking', forms a sort of annexe. (Bell Street in Marylebone, though, is becoming a serious rival.) Cecil Court affords a pers- pective of the second-hand book trade. It embraces the jumble of Fletcher's, in which expensive books are cheerfully mixed with cheap, and Watkins, who spe- cialise in holistic medicine, Zen, the supply of biorhythm kits and other such things far removed from most bookshop proprietors, whose ideal in life is to nip out the back, brew up and slump by the radiator with a pile of milk-and-honey creams at one side.
As well as containing shops which spe- cialise in travel, dance, antiquarian titles and old postcards, this most pleasant of London streets does have a horror. Many must have been beguiled into the punningly-named Bell, Book and Radmall by the window display of desirable titles on their dust-jackets. Inside, one finds an atmosphere which combines school, prison and the North Library of the British Museum. The owner presses a button by his desk to let one out: it is as though he suspects that one has been able to duck the roving television, camera, broken into a cabinet and is about to bolt out of sight with a copy of The Name of Action, signed, in its dust-jacket, with a despatch that would be envied by the hero of that novel. These people would do better to confine themselves to the production of mail-order catalogues. (There is another world of dealers, usually specialists, who work from private premises, although a growing num- ber, such as Words Etcetera in the Fulham Road, keep fairly regular hours and wel- come visitors.)
How pleasant it is to discover a good second-hand bookshop with a general stock. Two of the best in London are Skoob Books in Sicilian Avenue, which links New Oxford Street and Kingsway, and — partly owned by Sir Hugh Greene — the Gloucester Road Bookshop. With reasonable prices and an interesting stock that does not become a fixture, these are the sort of shop in which a chance browse can lead to a discovery that sets one on a trail across the country and out of the scope of this article.
The ramshackle quality which adds to one's enjoyment of a second-hand shop is irritating in one devoted to new titles. If a book is in print one would have thought
that it could, in theory, be obtainable with- out too much bother. How bad Dillon's University Bookshop has become. Pre- cious space has been given over to the sale of posters (monkeys on lavatories and so on), the stock is increasingly meagre, and — as is also the case at Foyle's — most of the staff are not trusted with money, so queues develop even in the quietest periods. Last Christmas, a video-machine was broadcasting an adaptation of a Raymond Briggs book . . . When will Lon- don have somewhere to match Black- well's?
I once asked a second-hand bookseller whether, by any chance, he had a copy of Evelyn Waugh's Wine in Peace and War, and was told, with a wave of the hand, `No, I'm afraid we only deal in the sewage end of the market here'; however slighted the other customers must have felt, it was an honest reply. A more confused one was given when I asked a lady, remotely con- nected with books, in the Sloane Square branch of W. H. Smith's whether she had a copy of the same author's Diaries. `Is she a classic, dear?' Having established that he most definitely is, I was told that she hadn't and that I had better catch a bus to the other end of Sloane Street and try Truslove and Hanson. Many, unaware that the shop belongs to the same group, must follow such advice each day. How much more sensible it would be to walk the few yards to John Sandoe's in Blacklands Terrace. The staff here display a knowledge rarely met with which can hardly have been gained during opening hours, for the shop never has a slack moment; the owner, in- deed, has defied the laws of physics with the number of books that he has in his limited space.
The success which efficiency has long brought to shops such as this and Heywood Hill's has inspited a former employee of W. H. Smith's to start a new chain of shops. When the first branches of Water- stone's opened many feared for their chances; in fact, by keeping long hours, maintaining a decent stock and employing a literate staff who never offer variants on 'if you can't see it we haven't got it', the chain has shown that there is a wider de- mand for books than has been popularly assumed.
If only publishers would realise this. How often it seems that a dull, imitative idea has been pushed through, grubbily produced and ignorantly copy-edited, only to be greeted with yawns of indifference. Even the multiplying remainder shops can- not shift them. Meanwhile, few sensations mix anticipation and disappointment in quite the way that a row of old World's Classics can do: at least, one thinks, here are those elusive Trollopes; but again it is only Constance Holme, whose works were elevated because a relation edited the series at the time. A little-remarked aspect of the sterling crisis is that Martha Redding Pease has been selling briskly in America: books, especially old ones, continue to make London worth a visit.
Previous page
