Harbour Books

Harbour Books, 21 Harbour St, Whitstable, Kent, CT5 1AQ

Late November is an interesting time to go for a walk on the beach.

Whistable Beach in Kent was almost deserted except for a handful of brave dog walkers and particularly persistent joggers. It was raining hard enough to notice and the wind was up, so it was difficult to take in the sights that make this seaside town so beloved. But looking out at the sea is always a worthwhile thing to do, even if it was only for a few minutes before scurrying back into the town.

Sopping wet and shivering, Harbour Books with its elegant storefront and beautiful artwork in the front window was a relief.

With two floors of new books in fiction and non-fiction, Harbour Books is the kind of establishment that makes a small town feel like a place, and not just a collection of houses and cafés. I always feel like an independent bookshop gives a place its soul.

On the ground floor is fiction, including a selection of contemporary literary fiction and best sellers as well as a quite well-stocked A-Z of novels. There are staff recommendations, a bit of a focus on local authors and a decent range of children’s books.  And there are lots of bookish gifts like notebooks, mugs and tote bags. It’s good all the charms of the very best bookshops, with hard wood floors that creak pleasingly underfoot, inspiring quotes painted on the walls in ornate cursive and friendly booksellers quietly chatting away to customers, recommending Christmas presents.

Upstairs is quieter; people just popping in for a browse don’t always make it to the upstairs of a bookshop. It’s the home of non-fiction including inspiring cook books, politics, local interest, gardening, nature writing, travel and an excellent collection of history books arranged chronologically by subject.

Perhaps because I don’t often read history books, I often find myself wondering about the people who do. My eyes immediately go to the novels or, failing that, for books that comment on the world as it is now, that look at contemporary issues that affect the world around me and about which I might conceivably be able to do something. I must confess that history books never attract me. But seeing a selection so carefully put together as the one at Harbour Books is cheering because it is a reminder that it takes all types of readers to make the world go round, and that for someone, this thoughtful, organised array of books will be an absolute feast. To those other readers who are getting something that I’m missing, I salute you.

Harbour Books feels like the kind of place that is all about books and friends.

With a 25 year history in Whistable, it’s like the friend that’s always been there for you. It champions local books by local authors, celebrating them like returning heroes. It introduces new books and reminds you of old friends that pop up from time to time to suprise you. It’s also a place for new friends, whether you’re chatting about books with a friendly bookseller or sharing poetry, prose and prosecco with new friends at their monthly Words on Waves evenings.

I hope to visit the next time I’m in Whistable and the time after that. Situated right near the harbour, perhaps it’s also a little bit like a lighthouse, guiding you out from the cold and the wet and into a safe and friendly place.

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Libreria

Libreria, 65 Hanbury St, London, E1 5JP

Libreria is that rare thing: a new London bookshop! While around the country – indeed, around the world – bookshops are closing down, it’s encouraging to see a new one pop up just around the corner from London’s Brick Lane. I went to visit yesterday, a sunny Sunday afternoon. After seeing a mention of the bookshop in the Guardian a few weeks back, I decided I’d like to see for myself.

What I saw has left me feeling a bit, well, confused.Walking in with very few expectations I was immediately impressed by this bookshop. I then made the mistake of doing an online search for Libreria when I got home, and reading a few things about the bookshop has left me with mixed feelings. But more on that later; there is more than enough to say about a visit to Libreria.

When you walk into Libreria, it takes a second to get your bearings. Because of the gentle curve of the space and the mirrors on the ceiling, the shelves, which are already packed to capacity with books, seem to carry on forever in every direction, including upwards into the sky. You can only stand there for a moment, stunned, while you take in your surroundings and internally map out the beautiful wooden shelves, painted a welcoming bright yellow. Throughout the shop are little reading nooks where you can sit and admire the books. In some bookshops his would seem a bit gimmicky, but here they are not just helpful, but perhaps even necessary. With every surface – vertical, horizontal and diagonal –  absolutely buried in books, I was often grateful for the ability to sit down in one of these little nooks and take a breath while I examined a book or tried to get my head around the layout of a particular section.

The selection of books is well-informed and interesting. This is not a place to get in and get out with a Le Carre novel, but it’s perfect if you’ve got a bit of time on your hands and want to find something new. Its real skill is in creating excitement about a new book. I love the feeling when I find something new that I need to snap up immediately, then rush home to turn it over, touch the cover, smell the pages, read and reread every word on the outside and crack it open to start reading as soon as possible. At Libreria, that ability to discover something exciting and inspiring takes precedent – and quite rightly so – over navigability. Rather than a simple ‘Fiction A-Z’, the shelves in Libreria meander in and out of logical order, more in keeping with the way your eye moves along a shelf of books anyway. Every now and then there is a vague sense of alphabetisation for a little while as you scan a row of books, but this can disappear suddenly and inexplicably, morphing into a completely different part of the alphabet or an entirely new system of ordering, so I quite quickly gave up trying to impose my own ideas of what should come next.

The sections in this bookshop are not titled ‘Fiction’, ‘Non-Fiction’, ‘Art’ and ‘Philosophy’. Instead you’ll find ‘Ways of Seeing’, ‘Enlightenment’, ‘Mothers, Madness and Whores’ or ‘The Future of Life and Death’. Yes, that does sound a bit pretentious. Of course it does.  But I think it’s always useful to have our notions of genre disrupted, and it’s fascinating to group books together in different and surprising ways. This system also makes it really clear from the outset that there is no point looking for something specific; on this journey you are in the passenger seat, being driven wherever the bookshop wants you to go, rather than where you think you should be going next.

Among the interesting and unexpected places I was taken were:

• In Gratitude by Jenny Diski. Diski sadly passed away earlier this week, about two years after being diagnosed with inoperable cancer. In Gratitude is the collection of the fantastic essays she had been writing for the London Review of Books, about her life, being half-adopted by the Nobel Prize winning author Doris Lessing as a teenager and about her experience of dying. I bought it on Thursday, as soon as I heard the sad news, and it was in a prominent position at Libreria.
• Inflatable Woman, a graphic novel by Rachael Ball that looked intriguing and I’m going to go back to buy next time I’m in the area
• Women who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype. I think this is a stellar title.

There were also displays of books selected by two amazing women – Jeanette Winterson and Shami Chakrabarti. Chakrabarti’s choices were fascinating and included The Arrival, a beautiful graphic novel about migration by Shaun Tan. We ended up buying two books: The Witches: Salem 1692, a satisfyingly thick history book for £20 and the Selected Stories of Sylvia Townsend Warner, of whom I hadn’t heard before but whose stories sound irreverent and powerful and focus on ‘the oddities of love.’ This set me back £18, which seems a lot for a paperback. And obviously I’m not comparing that with Amazon, but with other independent bookshops of a similar calibre who provide excellent service and a delightful experience, but without taking the piss on prices. Still, in the scheme of things, this is a small price to pay for an hour spend in Libreria and two amazing books.

When I got home and sat down to write this piece, I decided to find out a bit more about Libreria and how they see themselves. I often do this before writing about a bookshop because I like to know whether a bookshop has a particular speciality or a nice story or an inspiring mission statement that I can include when I write about them. So I googled Libreria. It’s had quite a lot of coverage since opening and the tone of much of it is pretty irritating. For now I’ll give Libreria the benefit of the doubt and assume it’s just the press that’s taken such a frustrating view of this opening. While it’s really heartening that the opening of a new bookshop has been met with any interest, a few articles have described it in a way that makes it sound like it was founded on the whim of its creator who wanted to do something a bit quirky and kooky. It’s described in this particularly wanky article as a ‘concept bookstore in east London’. What does that even mean? Libreria, according to its acolytes, is special because it aims to be a quite space away from information overload and incessant noise and does this by providing a carefully curated selection of excellent books.

I fail to see how this makes Libreria any different from any other good bookshop. I don’t deny that it’s a brilliant place, because it’s a space in which you can leave behind the noise and information overload of the outside world and instead focus on books alone, in a setting that allows for creativity, spontaneity and discovery. This is wonderful and necessary, but it’s hardly some super creative new hipstery thing that no one’s ever thought of before. It’s just…a bookshop. That’s what a good bookshop is, and what it does. The self-congratulatory tone of a lot of the press coverage makes it sound like they’re the first ones to hit on this totally quirky and twee idea. This feels a bit insulting to bookshops like Brick Lane Books, a few minutes down the road, which has been a stalwart of the community, providing the same service (if not a better one, as they work hard to engage the community in reading and literature) but without banging on about it, for over thirty years. It’s a bit insulting to all the booksellers and booklovers for whom a good bookshop isn’t a novelty or the quirky retro Instragram fad of the week, but a treasured (if underappreciated) part of life. I’m sure the folks at Libreria are aware that they are the latest, but by no means the first, brilliant bookshop in London. So I’ll chose to ignore the pretentious think pieces and just let a good bookshop be a good bookshop.

The idea of a safe, clean, quiet place where you can go inside and have respite from the world around you while getting lost with books is a great one, and one with a long tradition of libraries and bookshops. I applaud anyone setting up a new bookshop like this, particularly one as truly unique as Libreria. This place is a haven and I’m so glad London has another beautiful bookshop, with a bold and creative selection of books that invites you to experiment and learn, and enables the magic of stumbling upon the perfect thing.

Fossgate Books

Fossgate Books, 36 Fossgate, York, North Yorkshire, YO1 9TF

Fossgate, in the city centre of York, was built by the Vikings, as a bridge over the River Foss. It has had a fascinating history, taking on several different iterations. At the present, it is particularly noteworthy for being York’s ‘hidden gem’, which is home to dozens of small independent businesses. A massive banner stretches across the width of the north end of the street, proclaiming Fossgate the undisputed ‘ultimate street of independent businesses.’

I had the good fortune to visit Fossgate in December and happened to coincide with Small Business Saturday on the 5th December. Rambling up and down this vibrant city street, I popped in to many of the little businesses that make it unique, but as my readers know, there is no shop that can tempt me like a good bookshop. So I also dropped in to visit Fossgate Books. This quirky little bookshop is spread over two floors. It’s nowhere near as glossy or fashionable as many of the  London bookshops I haunt, but it’s got an understated, no-nonsense charm about it. And besides, the focus is firmly where it should be: on the books.

It was late afternoon when I went into the shop, but it was back in December and I remember that the sun had set well before 4pm that day, so Fossgate was beautiful in the soft light of the gloaming. There were very few other shoppers at that time; most had already headed back home for the evening, or into a warm pub  somewhere. The few of us in Fossgate Books had the place mostly to ourselves, while the attentive bookseller pottered around finishing a few end of day tasks, popped his head out now and then to greet someone passing by on the street outside and occasionally looked up from his desk and set his eyes benevolently upon his visitors. In the silence, it felt wrong to pull out my camera and notebook, but I made a mental note to remember some of the weird and wonderful titles so I could tell you all about them.

Fossgate Books has a wide selection and seems to specialise in second hand and rare books. I was delighted to find loads of  old children’s books, as well as hardcover modern first editions, varying in price from a couple of quid to £100. Parts of the collection were really quite charming; there was a quite expansive selection of literary biographies, which are always fascinating a whole shelf full of books about York and Yorkshire and an impressive selection of philosophy and religion books.

This is one of those bookshops that contains books you could have gone your whole life without ever seeing elsewhere. I chuckled to myself out loud when I saw a book called ‘The Rise of the English Shipping Industry in the 17th and 18th Centuries.’ I love how coming across a book like this can suddenly draw your attention to an incredibly specific area of study, something you would never think could possibly be very interesting. At first it seems comically niche, but then you realise that there is probably a whole community of people obsessed with this very subject, and a larger group than you might think of people who have made it their life’s work.

Independent bookshops are brilliant because they take us out of our own interests long enough to expose us to absurd books like this. They create those precious moments when something you previously thought was tiny and insignificant opens up to reveal a whole world within it. I have no doubt that if you visited Fossgate Books tomorrow, you would be so lost among the hundreds of books that you’d fail to find this specific one. But you’d find something else that would make you smile, or laugh, or think again, or possibly spark an interest in something you’d never heard of before. You won’t find the same thing I found, but you’ll find something, and I’d love to know what it is.

 

The Little Apple Bookshop

The Little Apple Bookshop, 13 High Petergate, York, YO1 7EN

APPLE.

Apple plum, carpet steak, seed clam, colored wine, calm seen, cold cream, best shake, potato, potato and no no gold work with pet, a green seen is called bake and change sweet is bready, a little piece a little piece please.

A little piece please. Cane again to the presupposed and ready eucalyptus tree, count out sherry and ripe plates and little corners of a kind of ham. This is use.

– from Tender Buttons by Gertrude Stein

Little things are not always as simple as their littleness makes them seem. The little finger of a newborn holds all the worry and anxiety and joy in the world to a new parent. William Blake saw a world in a grain of sand, heaven in a wild flower, and found infinity in an hour. James Joyce saw the eternal struggle for empathy and communion between human beings in one bumbling newspaper man’s wanderings around Dublin on the 16th June. Gertrude Stein saw in an apple a whole rainbow of things that were decidedly not an apple.

Little books, like Heart of Darkness, Mrs Dalloway, and more recently, We Should all be Feminists by Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche, can house world-changing, perception-altering ideas within a few dozen pages.

The Tardis is bigger on the inside.

The Little Apple Bookshop in York is…a little bookshop. It’s almost comically little considering that it sits in the shadow of York Minster, one of the largest cathedrals in Europe. But inside, there are books. Which means that inside, it’s bigger than you could possibly imagine. Inside, it contains more information that you could ever learn, more characters than you’ll ever know, more reasons to laugh, cry, rejoice, despair, be inspired, be depressed and ask questions than you would ever create on your own. And all in a single room not much bigger than my kitchen.

Crammed inside are books for all sorts of people, but mainly for the best sort of people: little children. Picture books, story books and chapter books line the walls and make them satisfyingly colourful. The children’s books at the Little Apple are excellent ones and there are actually enough of them! As an adult, I almost never give up on a book I’ve bought and decided to try, but when I was younger I could read the first paragraph of a book and decide yea or nay for absolutely no logical reason. If it was a no, I wouldn’t read another word. Children like this need lots and lots of choices, and not all bookshops understand this. But never fear; though she be but little, the Apple is fierce. It has books to satisfy the tastes of even the pickiest readers.

If you’re not a child, I commiserate. But there’s even choice for us grown-ups crammed in there. Classic and modern fiction from around the world is beautifully chosen, as are crime and mystery, graphic novels, cookery and a bit of non-fiction. Does the Little Apple have everything? No, stupid; it’s too little. But it’s got far more good stuff than most of us will ever need, let alone deserve. Such is the magic of good books; they expand time and space. They make a tiny, poky little room feel never-ending like a palace. They make an afternoon stretch time back and forth, so it’s like a year and also like 5 seconds at the same time, and then, like an elastic,  when you close the book, it snaps back and it’s just an afternoon again. The Little Apple Bookshop is a place where one could easily get lost in space and time, even if you haven’t much of either.

It’s such a bright, friendly, open, inviting place to be, that just visiting is reward enough. I didn’t even feel the need to bring home any new books for myself. I did, however, buy a present for my youngest brother, who never reads, though I always insist on buying him nothing but books at every gift-giving occasion. This time, the book he’s getting that I hope he might actually read is The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman. A fellow browser noticed me take it down from the shelf and whispered to me that her daughter loves this book, so I knew I had a winner.

According to Wikipedia, the subject matter of this book is: ‘good and evil, survival, magic.’ All that covered in 180-odd pages.

Next time you’re in York with a little bit of time and a little bit of money, pop in to the Little Apple Bookshop. You’ll want to buy everything, of course. But even if you walk away empty-handed, it’s impossible to leave without feeling like something – the world, your heart, your mind – has been made a little bit bigger.

 

Minster Gate Bookshop

Minster Gate Bookshop, 8 Minster Yard, York, YO1 7HL

In the shadow of the imposing York Minster, a little bit tucked away, you’ll find a quiet, little bookshop. On a cold evening, it radiates a soft yellow light from its front windows, promising warmth and refuge. In European Christian tradition, churches like York Minster have provided a sanctuary for the wretched and afflicted; criminals, orphans, victims of crime or violence and fugitives from the law could enter a church and be given asylum for some time. While York Minster would be a grand place to seek refuge and respite from a cruel world, I personally prefer a bookshop, where one need never fear being turned away or rejected, so long as one stays quiet and is gentle with the books.

I am a traveler in York. At least for now anyway, unless I decide to leave London and its extortionate cost of living behind and start again up North. For now, though, I’m just a traveler, dependent on the hospitality of others and, as Blanche DuBois put it, the kindness of strangers. This means that while I’m in York and away from home, I get to take refuge from my everyday life and instead spend some time in someone else’s everyday life. Now, in York, that someone could be anyone a Roman administrator, a Viking settler, an Anglo-Saxon priest, a Victorian writer or a 21^st century student. York has had so many lives already, as evidenced by its name. When the Romans first founded the city and built its still-standing walls in71 CE, they called it Eboracum. Under the Anglo-Saxons this became Eoforwic, then Jorvik under the Vikings and finally York, via various Middle English iterations including Yerk, Yourke and Yarke over the years. In this city there are endless possible narratives to slip yourself into as you shed your self for a little while.

I have written before about how reading and traveling are the perfect combination, as both are fundamentally about leaving behind what is known and familiar and journeying into a different place and a different self. Sometimes this is quite a terrifying prospect, but it can also be an incredibly comforting one as well. Growing up, one of the things that books were to me was a refuge. When family life was loud, when I didn’t want to answer questions, when I simply wanted to disappear, the best way to do this was to open a book. You see, being a girl with her nose in a book is like having an invisibility cloak. No one seems to see you, the book is your shield and it keeps prying eyes and minds at a distance. Little do they know, inside your cloak, a whole world is being built around you, seen from a new and exciting vantage point. It’s just like walking along the streets of a new city; your anonymity keeps you safe from having to engage, lets you hide out a little longer in the secret adventure you’re having on your own.

I had the same feeling in Minster Gate bookshop. Coming in out of the cold and away from the crowds, a whole world of possible escapes presents itself. Within the quiet space of a little bookshop, worlds open up. And in York, a city with such an improbably rich history to untangle, every new story comes with the promise of magic.

Minster Gate Bookshop is split over four floors, each a maze of different rooms. It presents the adventurer with dozens of subcategories of books; History is not just History, but: British History, Archaeology, Ancient History, Military, European, American and World History and, somewhat oddly, Transport. Fiction dominates the basement, with many classics available for discounted prices. They have every single Neil Gaiman book, all sitting in a pile on the floor and all for £3. There are new books, used books, rare and special edition books, prints and maps and all sorts beyond that! There’s everything from crime and mystery to folklore and fairy tale sections. The shelves seem to scream, ‘You can be anyone in here!’

Minster Gate Bookshop, while it caters for many tastes, has a decidedly literary persuasion. With full sections of Literary Theory and Literary Biography, it also has lots of rooms for those funny books that don’t seem to have a clear classification. In a poky little room up on what I think was the third floor, though I lost count, I found a treasure trove of fascinating clever escapes. Arthurian legend, feminist folktales, little-known classics and scholarly criticism rubbed shoulders. My particular favourites in this difficult-to-classify collection were:

The Book of English Magic by Philip Carr-Gomm

The Book of Legendary Lands by Umberto Eco

The Literary Heritage of the Arabs: An Anthology

The Blessed Shore: England and Bohemia from Chaucer to Shakespeare

I wanted to buy all of them and hide away forever wandering through far away, long ago and never-never lands, but in the end, I bought a hardcover first edition of The Second Virago Book of Fairytales by Angela Carter for £6. Like me, Angela Carter was fascinated by fairy tales and folk tales and believed that they have significant insights into why our culture is the way it is, as well as being an excellent example of oral storytelling and quite fun to write and rewrite.

It was only when I walked out of Minster Gate bookshop that I became aware again of the sounds of the city, the crush of the crowd, even what time it was and the stress of knowing I had to get dinner on. Inside, everything was suspended, just like when I used to open a book and hide for a while. When you’re fully engaged in the world of a story – or a world full of stories, which a bookshop should be – everything else seems to disappear. Minster Gate Bookshop, because of its location, probably gets a lot of tourists who poke their heads in, shriek ‘Oh it’s so cute and English! #quaint #janeaustenorwhatever’, take a #geek selfie and then walk out again. And so be it; it’s there for them to do that.

But I think what it’s really there for it to be a refuge that opens its arms to lovers of books, stories and words and lets them leave everything else at the door. Long may it continue to welcome all of us.

The European Bookshop

The European Bookshop, 5 Warwick Street, London, W1B 5LU

The view from the southern foot of London Bridge always seems to me to capture the essential character of this city.

To the left is Southwark Cathedral, which has stood for over a thousand years and is still in use.  On a Thursday, Friday or Saturday the courtyard outside this medieval site is filled with hungry Londoners eating meals from Borough Market, which has existed since 1040, though its current incarnation is decidedly Victorian.  Looking East is Tower Bridge, rising up victorious and grand from the Thames in all its late-Victorian glory and leading towards the Tower of London on the North side of the river, which also dates back to the eleventh century.  To the northeast is St Paul’s Cathedral, that most distinctive of London landmarks, an oily rascal known as well as Shakespeare’s Falstaff (Henry IV , anyone? anyone?) built at the close of the seventeenth century.  And the Gherkin – a symbol of London as a global financial centre – and the Shard make their case for the power of the new millenium.

The layers of history, the palimpsest of stories told by generations of Londoners and newcomers, make London what it is.  Ancient and modern, old families and humble immigrants, traditionalists and revolutionaries co-exist here, adding layers of stories which enrich rather than replace the city’s past.

Across the city, in Piccadilly Circus, the same is true.  London’s oldest bookshop, Hatchard’s, may be overshadowed by the huge Waterstone’s, but it’s still there.  Clarissa Dalloway’s harried wanderings along Regent Street and Bond Street may not have the same immediacy as the enormous Top Shop assaulting you with pop music, but even that fictional character colours the way I experience the area.  It is the middle ground between posh Mayfair, busy Oxford Circus and trendy Soho with its own unique history.  The layers of history in every part of London reflect the generations of people who have come here from other parts of the country and the world and added their touch or made a home.

So it’s no wonder that the stories of London are read and written and told in many dialects and languages, translated from Old English to Modern English, into Portuguese and Farsi and mirrored back to us in similar stories that arrive from all over the world.  We need only look at the number of Arabic, Russian, Polish, French and Bengali bookshops that have filled up the city to see how much London has benefited from the profusion of other and different voices that fill it.  One of these, hiding from garish Regent Street on a quiet road in Soho, is the European Bookshop.  It’s the best place in London to find books written in, translated from and translated into French, Spanish, Italian or German.

Now, having lived in North America, I am particularly appreciative of the mere fact that this bookshop exists.  Cuz, like, hello, there are, like, other languages, dude!  Even though my rusty French and dodgy Spanish keep me from fully appreciating what’s on offer, it makes me very happy that I live in a city which respects the importance of hearing each other’s stories enough for a place like the European Bookshop to thrive.

The ground floor is a Francophile’s paradise, full of French literature, poetry, philosophy and social commentary.  From Balzac to Baudelaire, Sade to Sartre, all of the famous Frenchmen and women who have captured the world’s imaginations are available in their original language, which is always the best way to read them.  But what is particularly brilliant about the European Bookshop is that it doesn’t settle for just the crowd-pleasers.   We can also explore the work of writers whose fame never went beyond France, or those we tend to forget originally wrote in French (cough cough, Samuel Beckett!)  It also gives browsers the chance to learn about writing from other Francophone countries or regions.  I discovered a Quebecois playwright, a Moroccan novelist and a wealth of novels and poetry by writers from former French colonies in North Africa, writing about the post-colonial experience in their colonial language.  I was reminded of how powerful and how inflammatory language can be, and of the power and significance of words, which we too often waste or use foolishly.

There is a small Italian bookshop at the back of the ground floor as well and Spanish and German books are downstairs.  In each you’ll find well-stocked selections of fiction, biography, history, poetry and theatre but there are also translation of English books into other languages. In the German section are the twisted fairy tales, imaginative novels and grim memoirs that you would expect from the country and the language, but their original passion and force is restored to them, I imagine, by being read in the language in which they were written.  If you’re interested in anything from Walter Benjamin’s brilliant musings to Angela Merkel’s biography, this is the place to go.

 In the Spanish ‘Traducciones’ section I found Ulisses by James Joyce, a translation of the epic novel.  Reading Ulysses in English is enough of a struggle, but trying to do so in translation is a task I’ll just have to admit I’m not up to.  Distressingly, Joyce is only two books away from Spanish translations of the 50 Shades series. Normally this would have made me livid, but I realised that looking at the wall of Spanish books next to me, I had no idea which books were award-winners and which were rubbish and that maybe that’s okay.  Now don’t get me wrong.  As an unrepentant book snob I think it’s extremely important to recognise good literature and – if nothing else – quite a lot of fun to deride bad literature, but every once in a while, it’s nice to leave ideas of good/bad or respected/mocked behind and just let yourself get swept up in the magic of a wall full of books.  And rummaging through a collection of poetry, plays and stories in another language is a great way to bring back the mystery and adventure of reading for its own sake.  Some books may be better than others, but when you’re liberated from prejudices and preconceptions, the only way to find out is to read!  We can return to our snobbery later; it’ll still be there.  Like all of our human failings, it’s not going anywhere, but the elusive glimmer of adventure is only a fleeting one.

In each section there is a collection of children’s books.  Which makes sense, really, because the best way to get some one to fall in love with words and language is through a good old-fashioned bedtime story.  Whether they take you to a dark enchanted forest or an old house in Paris that was covered with vines, the love of words starts with a book, read anywhere in the world, in any language.  The particular magic of The European Bookshop is that, like the city that gave it a home, it brings so many stories together in one place, not to replace each other, but merely to enrich our understanding of the story-filled world around us.

Dussmann das KulturKaufhaus

Dussman das KulturKaufhaus, Friedrichstrasse 90, 10117 Berlin, Germany

Dussman das KulturKaufhaus is a massive department store in the centre of Berlin, not far from the Brandenburg Gate and hoards of tourists. It’s similar in size and location to the John Lewis on Oxford Street. In other words, it sounds like the kind of place that I would tend to avoid. The reason I just can’t keep myself away from it, though, is that while most department stores are full of clothes and appliances, homeware and haberdashery and other non-essential things, Dussman is full of all the things I love and live off: books, music, DVDs, paper and pens and more books. It’s a book city, the kind you need a map to navigate but where the back roads and little country lanes are a lot of fun to explore and the perfect place to get lost. Split over several floors (three? four? five? I just can’t remember) and featuring a sunny atrium and a garden, Dussman is the biggest bookshop in Berlin and the one-stop-shop for all your bookish needs.

Wandering around the ground floor, you’ll find novels, poetry, mass-market thrillers, classical literature and bestsellers from a wide range of mainstream and independent publishers. Quantity is the most striking feature of this

Beautiful hardcover editions of German literary classics.

bookshop, but quality is there too; if you are looking for a special book, a particularly nice edition, an old classic, a hidden treasure or even the most specialist of genres, you can find it here. There are books by German authors, but there are also many books in translation from other languages. If, like me, you’re a lover not just of literature but of books, of paper and card and glue and vellum (not that I encounter much vellum, but I love the idea of it) then you’ll be pleased to know that between the novels, you can also find sheet music and maps. On the other side of the ground floor (am I getting across how large this bookshop is?) is the first music section, which is not just an afterthought but a wide and varied selection.

After you’ve had enough of the ground floor, you can take the lift if you’re clever to explore the others, where you’ll find every section a bookshop could possibly have: more music and film sections which have documentaries, jazz, classical and opera and world music, then books on art, cookery, gardening, humour, philosophy, sport, business, technology, education, history, languages, law, literary theory, politics, science, travel, comics, graphic novels and manga. I challenge you to name a book (or a film or an album) that this shop does not stock. On the top floor, in a rather uninspiring location next to the business and management books, I found one of my new favourite places: a couple of arm chairs pushed up against a big bay window, facing away from the shop and other browsers to look out over the rooftops of Berlin. By the time I’d made it up that far and then started to head back down again, I was quite exhausted and stopped for a bit of a rest in the excellent children’s and young people’s section.

The children who shop here must be very well-rounded as the selection of children’s books in German, English and other languages included stories and poems and lots of educational books about geography, history, science and pretty much every other subject you can imagine. I’m getting tired of listing subjects; from now on, just assume that if you can name it, Dussman has it. Watching families come into this busy bookshop and pick out new treasures to bring home and read together is the most encouraging thing to witness if you love books!

Finally, there is the English section, which is really a bookshop inside the bigger bookshop. I’m told it’s the largest collection of English books in Berlin, so it’s an absolute lifeline for ex-pats who are looking for books from home or feel that they can barely handle reading Proust at all let alone in German. It’s also great way to explore Germany’s literature even if you don’t speak the language. There is a whole section of English translations of books about Berlin and books by German writers. Before going to Berlin, I had read Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories which are insightful, subtle and highly amusing, but, ultimately, are still the work of an outsider looking in. As the world gets more and more globalised, I think we have a duty to find out more about the other people we share this planet with, but you can’t do that if you only read works that came from your own small island. That is why collections like these are always so interesting – when one country curates a selection of its finest literature to present to the rest of the world, it can’t help but cause debate, and the choices are often completely different from what someone on the outside would have predicted. After roaming around through this lovely bookshop-in-a-bookshop for a good forty minutes, we bought The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil and Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, which is a bit of a rite of passage for anyone interested in dense European novels. When I buy a book, I always like to find a time, as soon as possible, to sit down and admire my new purchase. At Dussman’s English bookshop, you can curl up on a sofa by the window and fondle the crisp new white pages while you look out onto the busy street below.

In a bookshop this large, it’s easy to get side-tracked and end up wandering aimlessly for hours. I say go for it. In a place with so many different possibilities, so many new things to pique your interest and make you think, you owe it to the adventurer in yourself to explore every different avenue. You have to be indiscriminate in your enjoyment, embracing the new and strange and obscure as well as the classic and best-selling and putting the two of them together. Sometimes I like to play a game with my bookshelves. I pick two books that I happen to have stuck on there beside each other and wonder what would happen if the characters were to meet. Would Stephen Dedalus play nicely with Pip? What would Dean Moriarty and King Lear talk about? It’s not the coolest game but it’s made me smile many times. At Dussman, these opportunities, questions, connections and segues are everywhere. They’re in between the pages of the book you’ve never heard of, or in the name of a German poem that makes you think of something you read when you were young, or in a travel guide to Bali. All you have to do is be patient, exploring everything you can until something exciting pops out at you.

In Which the Author Confesses her Crime

Dear Readers,

I have a confession to make: I am guilty of a small crime. I only hope you find it charming and that you don’t abandon your well-meaning but overly-zealous book-hunting correspondent.

Last week I walked into a large second hand bookshop in the south-west. I’m afraid I can’t be more specific than that lest my confession is whispered into the wrong ears. I roamed through aisles of bookshelves, looking for the good and interesting secondhand books in the sea of mass market paperbacks. The hidden gems are always there and I welcome the challenge.

I picked up a tattered old hardcover book (which I shouldn’t name) and was turning the the thick, yellowing pages when a small piece of paper fluttered out. I knelt down to pick it up and read the little note that had lovingly been tucked into this book.

Some time ago, judging from the name ‘Neville’ and the fragility of the paper, a sister used this funny little book as a means of transporting a feeling, a thought, to a loved one.

The note reads, ‘Neville, Dad’s copy of S.C.C.C. Handbook, thought you might enjoy it,’ followed by a swooping signature I can’t quite make out but for some reason am supposing is female.

Now, I know this note wasn’t meant for me. But it was meant for someone who would know what it meant. Someone who would understand that within the brittle, yellowing pages of an old book, a human life can be deposited, memories can sit and collect, waiting to be opened up and brought back to life with startling force. Maybe Neville wasn’t that person, and when he was clearing out his cluttered house he didn’t keep a piece of his family history. I prefer to think that he did understand, and kept the book in a place of honour, even if he never read it himself, because it meant something. I don’t know how old this note is, so maybe Neville is long dead and it’s the original owner’s grandchildren who sent it to its new home here in this bookshop.

The truth doesn’t really matter. What means most to me is the way this simple note, tucked into this little book, opens up infinite possibilities for stories happy and sad. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I believe that human lives are bound up with books. We move through chapters in our lives, turn over new leaves, impose narrative structure on random events and aspire to happy endings. I know this note wasn’t meant for me. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t want to be part of the story. So, selfishly leaving the book itself to wait for the next browser, who, I know, will now get less out of it, I tucked the note into my pocket and took it home with me.

I just can’t help it; I love a good story. I hope you won’t judge me too harshly.

 

Topping and Company Booksellers

Topping & Company Booksellers, The Paragon, Bath, BA1 5LS

Question: When is a bookshop not just a bookshop?

Answer: When you can eat Spanish tapas courtesy of trendy London restaurant Morito among the shelves of an evening, attend a monthly Reading Group where you actually talk about books, take a guided tour through haunted Bath with a mystery writer or listen to the biggest names in contemporary literature (Will Self, Deborah Levy and David Mitchell are coming up) wax philosophical while you have a glass of red wine.

Topping and Company Booksellers, in the beautiful, elegant and quintessentially English city of Bath, has many different incarnations. At times it’s tense, as when it’s hosting a particularly heated debate. At others, it’s  bursting with excitement, as in the moments before a celebrity walks through the door. But most of the the time, it’s just a lovely bookshop, quiet, civilised, refined and full of simple delights.

On the glorious Sunday morning when I was last in Bath, the sunlight spilled in through the wide front windows and filled the shop’s interior with its brightness. The soft, warm wind came in through the open door so that the shop felt so much like a hidden clearing in a wood that I almost expected rose buds and dandelion fluff to fly in on the breeze. While the hardwood floors and tall wooden shelves undoubtedly make the shop as dark and cozy as it should be in the wintertime, today it was the perfect version of a modern Enchanted Forest. A place where, as beautiful as the sunlit city of Bath is, the magical possibility is much greater in the dappled light of this mysterious place, where adventures and romances crouch on every shelf, waiting for their magical whispers to reach your ear, waiting for you to comply with the fairies’ mischievous requests that you let them come out.

There were few other travellers wandering through the Enchanted Forest when I began my journey. While most stayed outside in the safety of bright sunlight, I walked straight in and as deep into the forest as I could, unafraid of getting lost. I weaved my way through corners covered with virtually every genre you could ever want: literary fiction, science fiction, fantasy, travel guides and literary travel writing, languages, sport, health, games, nature, cookery, humour, media, psychology, history, current events and even a whole bay dedicated to ghost stories, all of which are arranged beautifully on shelves and in attractive displays on tables. In addition to this impressive range of genres, Topping and Company devotes equal space to established classics as it does to forgotten treasures and contemporary books exploring every aspect of modern life. It’s a collection as prolific as nature itself and as diverse as the people who pop in and settle down in the chairs around the shop to admire and decide which books to bring home.

After spending a good deal of time in fiction, as I always do, I ventured on and into the children’s section near the back of the shop. I know these parts well, but they can be daunting to those unfamiliar to them, those for whom it’s been far too long since they took their shoes off and ran barefooted over mossy paths and climbed up gnarled roots. Fortunately, if this is an enchanted forest, it is inhabited by a fairy godmother called Victoria has marked the way for those less able to navigate on their own. Victoria’s Recommendations do the art of bookselling proud. She has hand-picked the finest spoils and presented them for our inspection, giving us her treasures to take home. The books are arranged by age group and go beyond the obvious choices, taking in everything from brand new picture books to a thoughtful range of young adult novels.

Up a couple of stairs, you enter the Arts Room, the heart of the bookshop, announced by a large sign listing off the impressive range of subject matter covered in this small room: Arts, Architecture, Design, Photography, Antiques, Poetry, Drama, Film, Music, Philosophy, Crafts, Literary Criticism, Languages, Reference and Science. Though it is smaller than the rest of the shop, this back room holds beautiful books of art and architecture, pages and pages of theory and criticism, signed copies of famous recent titles and a curated collection of excellent old and new books. I probably found half a dozen new or recent books of poetry and literary theory (I am biased towards literature in my bookish adventuring) that I had never heard of but was dying to read. A new book on oral storytelling in Chaucer, the Collected Poems of Anthony Thwaite, an analysis of the state of the art of letter writing and a book on First World War poetry all had to be left behind, though I haven’t stopped thinking about them and will soon return. This room and I have unfinished business.

The Arts Room is crammed with fascinating books which, gathered together, are simultaneously depressing – in the sense that this one room contains more knowledge than any person can read and absorb in a lifetime – and uplifting in the sense that we belong to the human race, incapable, admittedly, of magic and sorcery, but masters of creativity.  Small and circular, this room encloses you and threatens to swallow you up, lulling you into a deep sleep and confusing you until you don’t remember why you would ever leave. Be wary lest you fall under its spell and stay forever.

 

West End Lane Books

West End Lane Books, 277 West End Lane, London, NW6 1QS

‘Now that we have smart phones and tablets, people are getting more isolated by the day.’

‘People don’t care about the high street any more; we’ve lost our sense of community.’

‘Parents don’t read with their children these days; they just give them iPads and let those do the work.’

‘Bookshops are relics of the past and books are on the way out.’

These are just some of the nasty, ludicrous lies that I hear spat back at me with a little too much pleasure whenever I tell people that I spend much of my time daydreaming about owning a quiet, peaceful, messy little bookshop of my own one day.

I tell them: ‘It will have big comfortable chairs where mums and dads can sit and read while they wait, with their little ones happily sitting in the children’s section for story time’ and they say, ‘Ain’t nobody got time for that.’

I tell them: ‘We’ll have local authors come in the evening to do readings, book-signings and host debates’ and they say, ‘Who would bother when you can watch that on Youtube?’

I tell them: ‘Our staff will know everything about every kind of book, hear about everything that happens in publishing and be able to find the thing you didn’t know you wanted or make the perfect recommendation’ and they say, ‘You mean just like Amazon but I have to leave my house.’

Yes, some people are doing everything they can to make me believe that my little dream bookshop is nothing more than a fantasy. Unfortunately for them, West End Lane Books is very real. The very fact that it exists gives me hope, because it proves that people do care about their communities, that some things can still excite us enough to make us (god forbid) leave the house now and then, and that there are people who still value coming together – for story time, for a reading, or just to browse in silent solidarity – to celebrate the characters, the stories and the books – those most beautiful of objects – that we love.

West End Lane Books is my dream bookshop, the kind of place that keeps me sane in the midst of a digital nightmare. It is the epitome of everything that has always been great about bookshops and a defiant answer to all the pessimists who think that places like this should be singing their swan songs. I just love it.

The dark brown wood paneling of the roof, floors and bookshelves is perfect, just how I would want it to be. With the light pouring in from the front window, being inside this bookshop in the late afternoon feels like being inside a treehouse. Everything is a dark, comforting, nutty brown, the covers of books provide little splashes of colour, and the hush in the shop makes you feel like you’re 100 feet up in the air, above the noise and speed of the world below.

Despite the open plan and the handful of little nooks that make it feel like there’s more space than there is, the bookshop isn’t actually very large, so the booksellers have made the shrewd decision to aim for quality rather than quantity. Naturally this means that you won’t find anything you could ever possibly want in here, but you’ll find a lot, and you’ll probably find something better than what you thought you wanted anyway. Many bookshops this size devote a good half of their space to Fiction, with only small (almost token) sections for art, philosophy, culture, cookery and children’s books. Here, the distribution of space is much more egalitarian. Art, Architecture, Food and Drink, Travel, Philosophy, Television, Drama and Sport all get far more attention than they would in a lesser bookshop and while there may not be as many books in each section as one might like, what is there is the very best available, arranged beautifully and just begging you to pick up book after book and admire each one. The poetry section, while smaller than I’d like, is also impeccably selected, with a particularly international feel and books that span the centuries, from Beowulf, The Epic of Gilgamesh and the Norse Edda to Shakespeare, Baudelaire and William Carlos Williams and all the way up to cutting edge contemporary poetry. It’s impressive how well West End Lane Books has sifted through centuries of poetry to provide a small sampling of only the best. I just wish there were more of it.

The fiction section is, once again, beautifully presented and cleverly curated, with paperback novels lining the shelves in perfect alphabetical order and a display the finest editions of old and new favourites perfect for treasuring and passing on to the next generation.  Independent publishers like Pushkin and Persephone are put in places of honour, just as they should be.  In the fiction section I found the first of the two books I came home with, Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio by Pu Songling, a collection of bizarre and magical Chinese stories written between 1640 and 1715. It is apparently held up as ‘the supreme work of fiction in the classical Chinese language.’ I had never heard of it, but then that’s what good bookshops are for.

The second book I bought was Shaking a Leg, the collected journalism and essays of Angela Carter, covering literature, food, feminism, travel, art and everything in between. It promises to be highly entertaining.

Finally, there is the children’s section, given a huge amount of space and stocked with brilliant books for children who still have to rely on mum and dad for stories to awkward teens like I once was, who will desperately bury their heads in thick Young Adult novels to avoid real life. West End Lane Books does all kinds of different services for children and families, from book donations to local schools to book-based party favours, but the 4 o’clock Story Times on Mondays and Thursdays have to be my favourite. In the children’s section, on the colourful carpet beside the two giant teddy bears, I can imagine groups of children enchanted by fairy tales and laughing with silly poems.

For their parents and other adults, West End Lane Books has a fantastic programme of events in the evenings, including a Book Group and talks by authors. I am signed up to their mailing list and get excited every time it comes through, as it seems that each month there is some cool new thing that I could try. If you live in London it’s definitely worth signing up to the updates, because you never know what amazing thing they’ll do next.

So as far as I’m concerned, if you don’t love West End Lane Books, you haven’t got a heart. For there is some kind of adventure in this small little shop for everyone. If you’re six, it’s as simple as snuggling up, closing your eyes and sailing away on a pirate ship or flying over London like Peter Pan. If you’re a little older, the adventure might be meeting your favourite author, or contributing your insight in front of strangers in a book group. If you’re a little older and a little shyer, you’ll have to do what I do and explore the world by scanning the shelves for a hidden gem you’ve never heard of and trying it out. From my experience, it’s always worth it.