Heywood Hill's at 60
James Fergusson
Heywood Hill's bookshop is 60 years old this month. Heywood Hill, who found- ed it and gave it its dash, is 10 years dead; Nancy Mitford, whose wartime stewardship gave it a larky glamour, has been in her grave at Swinbrook these 23 years. The shop has been through three changes of ownership although, impressively, it has moved only once, all the way from No 17 to No 10 Curzon Street. It remains tiny, cramped, apparently chaotic; more like an overdressed West End stage-set than a laboratory of efficient commercial practice.
Other bookshops hold much more stock, have bigger windows, a proper paperback section, more room for special signed-copy tables, sale-of-the-week and early remain- der displays, top ten fiction, non-fiction and 'other' racks, deep, decorative publish- ers' dump-bins. What can the 'footfall' in Mayfair (even next door to Trumper's) be compared with that in Dillons-Hatchards, Waterstone's-Harrods or Smith's-Water- stone's? Surely negligible. Again, other cultish London bookshops in the past Harold Monro's Poetry Bookshop, home of the Georgians, Birrell & Garnett, out- station of the Bloomsberries — have come and gone; what is it that gives Heywood Hill's its staying power, why should it head so serenely for its century? The shop now even has a £10,000 literary prize named after it.
John Saumarez Smith, the Old Wyke- hamist in charge, is quite clear about the answer. It is, he says, 'a question of scale', of knowing your books, knowing your cus- tomers, and knowing exactly what you are doing. The chains are now publisher- driven: they argue about discounts, adver- tising, 'point-of-sale' material, authors' appearances, television tie-ins. They are not interested in books, but in marketing; not in customers, but in sales.
The only advertising Saumarez Smith allows is on anniversaries. His eccentric concession for the shop's 60th is to issue a catalogue of secondhand books written, edited or translated by the shop's customers, alive and dead. Entitled Reperusals (a nod to Logan Pearsall Smith), the catalogue runs to 364 items and stops, for some reason, at the letter M — M for Mitford. Authors range from Beaton and Betjeman to Lees-Milne and Leigh Fermor, from Ivy Compton-Burnett to Robertson Davies, Antonia Fraser to Christopher Isherwood.
By far the most entertaining item in the catalogue, however, is not a book at all but a collection of letters written by Nancy Mitford, the bookseller turned buyer, to `Miss Liz', Elizabeth Forbes, the loyal assis- tant in Curzon Street who processed the emigree novelist's orders. She writes affec- tionately, teasingly, naughtily: Do press the Ladies of Alderly on the elderly when Handy [Handasyde Buchanan, Forbes's employer] isn't looking.
Please can I have Brian Howard? AWFUL price, I shan't pay for years tell Molho [Mrs Buchanan].
Saumarez Smith is asking £2,500 for the series, and they deserve to go straight to Mitford's youngest sister, the Duchess of Devonshire: good for the Chatsworth Collection and good for the Duke, who since 1991 has been Heywood Hill's benign majority shareholder.
Dave's sold out to commerce.' Nancy Mitford called her 'Miss Liz', Osbert Sitwell called her 'the Admiral's Daughter'. Elizabeth Forbes, daughter of Admiral of the Fleet Sir Charles Forbes, wartime Commander-in-Chief Home Fleet, is a vivid demonstration that loyal staff breed loyal customers. She gave 23 years to Heywood Hill's, coming to the shop first in 1946 on being demobbed from the WRNS, and then, after three years' bookselling in Stockholm (her mother was Finnish- Swedish), full-time from 1950 until 1973.
While she was in Sweden she started going to the opera (it was cheaper than the cine- ma) and, in the Sixties, she started writing about it. From 1970 for 10 years she wrote regularly for the Financial Times (in the early days scurrying off to Covent Garden after a full day in Curzon Street), and has been a prolific freelance ever since, for Opera News and Opera Magazine, as well as contributing over 1,000 entries for The New Grove Dictionary of Opera. She has also added her own books to the boolcsellers'shelves, in 1985 completing a double operatic biography, Mario and Grisi, which she had begun in the shop (and which appears at £20 in Reperusals), and writing smaller guides in Opera from A to Z (1977) and The Observer's Book of Opera (1982).
`We were passionately interested in our customers,' says Forbes. The 'party-like atmosphere' of the shop she puts down largely to Nancy Mitford. So many cus- tomers being old friends of hers, or of Hey- wood Hill himself, meant that they treated the few other staff as friends too. Forbes's nodding acquaintance with Anthony Pow- ell, Elizabeth Bowen, Eric Ambler, Henry Green and the rest led to her being wined and dined by Gore Vidal in Rome, Harold Acton at La Pietra. She had a long corre- spondence with Patrick White and posted him fish-kettles from Elizabeth David. She served John Le Carre when he was just a quiet spy down the road at Leconfield House, she found secondhand Rex Stouts for Marlene Dietrich, she fielded book requests from Graham Greene and Somer- set Maugham in the South of France, tele- grams from Ian Fleming in Jamaica.
Heywood Hill's unusually personal ser- vice — exclusive and off-putting to some, completely reassuring to others — is main- tained by John Saumarez Smith, who is now the longest-serving ever of all the shop's staff. He joined in September 1965, the Monday after the Friday Heywood Hill retired. Urbane, diligent, hard-reading, he is a deft juggler of books and customers; and he knows as much about the second- hand market and old-plate books as about new fiction and biography, which is these days an almost unheard-of conjunction. Heywood Hill's has become one of the last bespoke bookshops. It is an extraordinary institution and a remarkable survival.
James Fergusson is obituaries editor of the Independent.
Previous page
