The Haunted Bookshop (Sarah Key Books)

Sarah Key Books The Haunted Bookshop, 9 St Edward’s Passage, Cambridge, CB2 3PJ

It’s official.  I’ve found the strangest bookshop in the UK.  Congratulations to me.

Cambridge’s Haunted Bookshop is one of the few bookshops in the world that is truly unique  – the only one of its kind – and I love it. I’m massively intimidated by it, but I completely love it.  While the Waterstone’s in Cambridge has a great selection and a plethora of inspiring titles, it still looks exactly like my local Waterstone’s in Islington.  And the one in Trafalgar  Square.  And the one at Gower Street.  Even Cambridge’s own independent bookseller, Heffer’s (review forthcoming), looks exactly like every other branch of Blackwell’s, the major chain that now owns it.

There are a lot of up-sides to this gentrification of everyday life; it makes us comfortable enough to go into a bookshop anywhere in the world (or at least the country) because we know it can’t be all that different from the one at home.  And in this day and age, any method towards the end goal of getting people into a bookshop justifies the means.  But I think there’s also a lot that gets lost when the slightly different, thoroughly quirky and downright bizarre are edged out.  Haruki Murakami wrote that ‘if you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.’  Surely he could just as easily have warned us that if you only get those books from Amazon’s Top Ten List or – worse – the Books section at Tesco (shudder) your bookshelf will look the same as everyone else’s.  And your stories will be the same, too.

That said, I would love to meet someone whose local go-to bookshop is this tiny, cramped little shop in St. Edward’s Passage.  What if this was the place you always went when you fancied a browse, if this the collection of books you had to work with whenever you needed a lit fix?  I’d imagine that the bizarre combinations your bookshelf held and the stories of hunting, finding, losing, sharing, wanting, coveting, considering and surrendering that those books told about you would fill many pages themselves.

But enough of my philosophising. There’s a bookshop to be fawned over.

First of all, it seems like the shop has two names.  Fine.  Why not?  As it turns out, Sarah Key Books (named, no doubt, after a woman called Sarah Key) specialised in secondhand and antiquarian books and particularly in children’s literature for years before it found its current home at what is called The Haunted Bookshop.  Unfortunately I do not have any answers as to how, why or by what it’s haunted.  I mean I could of course go all humanities student on you and say that it’s haunted by the voices and stories of writers and readers past.  Which, you know, I’m pretty much convinced it is.  But I’ve been waxing poetic about dog-eared pages a little too much of late, so I’ll refrain.  The other possible haunting is the palpable presence of the owner, sitting behind her desk, head popping up from between piles of books, who almost seems to wish that you’d leave her alone and let her get on with it.  It’s kind of a Bernard Black situation.  Although once you actually go talk to the staff I promise they’re much lovelier than Bernard Black.

The collection of secondhand and often first editions of classic children’s books is absorbing.  From Matilda to Harry Potter, from Enid Blyton to Hans Christian Andersen, from Alice Liddell to Snow White, every child and every childlike adult is covered.  Beautiful illustrated hardcover copies and tattered paperbacks range from £4 or £5 to roughly £1500, for something like, say, a first edition of Prince Caspian.  For those of us who will probably never have the kind of disposable income required to do more than pick up and maybe sniff these books (if you’re feeling cheeky) it’s like the trials of Tantalus.

Children’s books aren’t all that’s on offer though; the Folio Society editions make their appearance too, as do various editions of classics. I had my eye on a copy of one Sherlock Holmes novel or another, as well as a FS edition of Wuthering Heights.  I refrained from buying anything, to my dismay and my wallet’s satisfaction.

Despite not going home with any of these beautiful books, I still felt glad to have found this strange and wonderful little place today.  Like Alice falling into Wonderland, or Harry landing in Diagon Alley, walking into the Haunted Bookshop is like stepping through a portal.  It’s like being transported back to a time before global monopolies (yes, I’m cross with Amazon for buying Goodreads; I promised not to rant about it), super-chains and clinical, sanitised spaces where no one is ever challenged and nothing new ever happens.  It makes me glad to live in the UK because it seems to me that while so much of the world just steps in line and lets the strange and quirky and unpredictable fade out of their lives, some people here (few and far between as they may be) still put up a fight for their weirdness.  Sarah Key Books: you’re one of a kind and I hope you never stop fighting to stay that way.

Henry Pordes Books

               Henry Pordes Books, 58-60 Charing Cross Road, London, WC2H 0BB

There was a time in my life when I went to this bookshop two or three times a week.  It made sense, really; it was on my way home.  Okay, it was one way home.  Okay, it was twenty minutes out of the way.  I called it the scenic route.

But Henry Pordes was worth the time I ‘wasted’ and the money I spent on it.  It was the first of the Charing Cross Road bookshops that I discovered when I first moved to London and so I think  I subconsciously compare every other shop I enter to this one.

Charing Cross Road is perhaps one of the most famous book-buying destinations in the world, thanks in large part to Helene Hanff’s brilliant novel about her post-war correspondance with Marks & Co., a bookshop that used to be at 84 Charing Cross Road.  If you haven’t read it, it’s a short epistolary novel that you can get through in a couple of hours and it’s definitely worth it.  I’d offer to lend you my copy, but tragically, I read the entire thing on a plane and then stupidly left it there.  But books never disappear.  No one, upon finding a stray book, would drop it in the bin; something about it wouldn’t let you.  You’d put it in a lost and found, or leave it behind somewhere where it would stay dry, or maybe donate it to a secondhand bookshop.  And if it were lucky, it would end up on Charing Cross Road.

Henry Pordes is busy at almost all times of day and its visitors include: 1. frazzled Arts & Humanities undergraduates, 2. awestruck American tourists, 3. antiquarian book dealers consulting on acquisitions or trying to sell their own books, 4. old men wearing tweed who head straight for the history section and 5. wanderers whose facial expressions indicate that they’ve never been here before and had no idea how good a decision they just made by walking in.

The shop’s front had been undergoing renovation for the past couple of weeks, but when I went yesterday its beautiful front window was once again visible from the street.  In this window are the books that trap you.  First editions of books of poetry, comics, art books, political commentaries, modern classics and not-so-modern classics are displayed proudly in the front window, and continue inside, covering the upper walls of the main room.  It doesn’t surprise me that the more valuable, antiquarian books are kept either high out of reach or behind glass.  I mean, it disappoints me of course, because just to touch them would be more than lowly English students dream of, but I get it.  Fortunately, they are still visible and give the shop an air of gravity; you feel that you’re in the presence of history, of genius and, essentially, of humanity’s greatest achievements.

On the ground floor, there is an entire corner whose three sides are covered with literary theory and literary biography.  I came here once while writing my dissertation on Ezra Pound and found, in this section, a book called Ezra Pound’s Chinese Friends. I thought it might end up being somehow relevant, and as it wasn’t very expensive I bought it.  It ended up being so useful that it became the central text in that dissertation.  It just goes to show that sometimes we humans don’t really know what we need, and if we were only ever to pursue the exact thing that we want, because we want it, right now, we would miss out on finding the things that we never knew we needed or, as a recent New Yorker article put it, ‘the book beside the book’ that you were looking for.  Also on this floor is a small room in the back full of history and political books, a shelf of big,  hardcover children’s classics and an admirably well-stocked collection of art books.  There was a beautiful hardcover book of full colour paintings by Modigliani that was £16 – much cheaper than the retail price – but still to expensive for me.  What I did buy in the end came from the basement.

Downstairs are the travel, more art, psychology, fiction, poetry and drama sections, as the map of the shop at the top of the stairs indicates.  Yes, there’s a map of this bookshop.  I think there’s something so romantic about the idea that a visitor might need a map to keep him/herself from getting lost in the basement and never coming out.  In the fiction section, I bought a copy of Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence for only £4.  I have read the book before but realised lately that I don’t have a copy and might soon be in a position where I need one so I wanted to invest.  It’s always difficult buying a copy of a book you’ve already read.  You have to weigh up your options and decide whether to go for a cheap copy (you have already read it, so aesthetics shouldn’t be that big a deal the second time round) or spring for a more expensive copy (this is a book you’re going to read twice; surely you want a copy worth a second go-around, right?).  I settled for something in the middle, with a solid, sturdy Penguin classics edition at a third of the retail price.  I also bought a hardcover copy of Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad for £3.50, which is about about a fifth of retail price.

Other highlights of this basement are the bay full of Folio Society editions of classic novels.  As anyone who regularly follows this blog is already aware, I adore the Folio Society.  Their recent tube adverts which read ‘Re-kindle your love of beautiful books’ are delightfully sassy.  And with a whole shelf of these gorgeous editions stretching from floor to ceiling, I feel that I could be perfectly happy without ever leaving this room.

One of the volume’s in Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time is called Books do Furnish a Room and I think the man is onto something with this statement.  Although many of my arguments against ‘e-books’ are more intellectual and political than ‘But books are pretty!’, sometimes that’s the one that resonates with people most.  And it is the argument that the shelves of Henry Pordes quietly put forwards themselves.  The way we buy books is different from the way we buy any other commodity, whether it’s food or clothes or…what else do normal people spend their money on?   We buy books not only for ourselves, but to put them against the other books we have, in the hopes that our shelves will say something about who we are as people.  We buy them not only for ourselves, but also for the friends who’ll borrow them, the family members who’ll steal and probably never return them, the children who’ll inherit them and the strangers who’ll find them in the basement of a bookshop one day.

The sight of straight lines of books, standing proudly spine to spine, row upon row like soldiers, resolute in the battle against their obsolescence, warm a bibliophile’s heart.  More than any list on a screen, these rows of books remind us not only of the books we’ve read and through them the things we’ve learned and the journeys we’ve taken, but also of the many books we haven’t read.  They are the ones we want to read, the ones sitting on our shelves waiting and burning with the need for recognition in the backs of our minds.  They speak to the ingenuity and creativity of all those writers who came before us and all those readers who treasured their books as long as they lived, until those hallowed volumes ended up here.  In a way, Charing Cross Road is book-heaven.

Church Street Bookshop

Church Street Bookshop, 142 Stoke Newington Church Street, London, N16 oJU

Well, fancy that, we’re back in Stoke Newington!  And the 73 bus, with its views from the upper deck of the busy, colourful high street, has seduced me once again.

Church Street Bookshop is the perfect bookshop for the strong, silent type.  Bookshops like the Stoke Newington Bookshop, just a ten minute’s walk away, are paradises for those who love being social, talking about books and being part of a community of bibliophiles, while its smaller neighbour is for those who prefer nothing but the unobtrusive sound of soft jazz tinkling in the background and the whispers of yellowed pages and black type between wooden shelves.  Personally, I think I’m somewhere between these two types of bookhunters, or maybe I change by the day.  At times, I quite fancy a chat with the bookseller about how amazing the inscription on an edition of Sula is, but more often I’m happy to browse alone, in my own little world.

But that doesn’t mean there isn’t also a sense of community here; while I was wandering through the small space this morning, two people came in who seemed to be religious devotees of this secondhand shop and one of them was a lovely older lady bearing flowers for the bookseller.  Such are the wonderful people-watching opportunities that bookshops foster!

The front windows of the bookshop are filled with colourful children’s books on display and all are secondhand.  Inside, the bright front windows let in so much light that it’s a bit like maybe light from the heavens has broken through the clouds to shine down on the very spot where the book that’s going to change your life is hiding.  That’s an exaggeration.  But it is very well-lit.  And I do believe that if a light from heaven was going to shine down on a place where a human life might be changed, it would absolutely have to shine on a secondhand bookshop.

Boxes (presumably of books) block the entire middle section of the back corner, where fiction, poetry, politics and philosophy live, but it works, because it closes an otherwise open space off into more secluded corners; perfect for hiding away from the rest of the world.

Each bookshop’s selection is a little bit different and these differences stem from things like the owner’s taste, location and the local population.  Secondhand bookshops, then, are revealing because they rely on the books they’ve received from donors, at least in large part, I assume.  Of course this is all completely speculative since I’ve never worked in a used bookshop.  I’m just a fan.  Anyway, whatever the reason, his heart or his shoes (casual Dr. Seuss reference…anyone?), this bookshop has a really brilliant selection of recent and contemporary literature. Almost the entire back wall of the shop is filled with it.  Margaret Atwood, Ian McEwan, Angela Carter, Salman Rushdie, Toni Morrison…they’re all there and in fine form.  Such an emphasis is put on these more modern titles that there is half a bay labelled ‘Pre-Twentieth Century’, with one copy of Pride and Prejudice, one of Bleak House…you get the idea.  The classics aren’t that well represented, but I don’t think that’s such a bad thing.  There are loads of editions of the classics that are cheap and most secondhand bookshops have them by the boxfull; it’s the contemporary novels that are harder to get secondhand.  Which is why this bookshop is so handy!

The shop also has a very good collection of children’s books, cookery, history, local interest and London-related books.  But as always, I gave these only a very cursory one-over before heading back to Poetry and Fiction.  I am so predictable and must be very boring to anyone who wishes I would talk more about the history sections of these bookshops.  Oopsy.

Aside from the fantastic selection of books, this bookshop is notable for its prices; everything is so ridiculously cheap it feels unfair.  Obviously an oversized hardcover edition of a thick book will always be more than a couple of quid, but of all the paperbacks I picked up, the most expensive one I saw was about £2.90, but most were in the £1.60-£2 region.  It’s the kind of place that’s very dangerous because you can keep collecting cheap books until all of a sudden you get the till and it’s not so cheap anymore.  But personally, I’d argue that it’s more dangerous to never buy books at all, so I’ll leave you to weigh up your chances for survival.  Hint: go with the books.  Even if you end up with too many.

I made the rounds of the shop several times and on one of these tours I found the book I came away with.  It was a copy of the Collected Stories of Dylan Thomas.  When I left, I brought it up to the till, which is also covered with books and hides a back room which promises more stacks.  I paid £2.50 for it.  I surprised myself by buying this.  I always think of Dylan Thomas the poet before Dylan Thomas the writer of plays and short stories, but that’s completely unfair to him, I suppose.  I like Thomas a lot – I already have a copy of his Collected Poems and one of his plays – but I’d say my interest in him generally is enough to pick up the book and examine in, but usually not enough to buy it.

What changed my mind today was this beautiful inscription:

‘December 2006

To Louise –  You are a wonderful, extraordinary and amazing woman and it has genuinely been my privilege to work with you these last four years.  Now I’m looking forward to knowing you as a friend for all the rest of my life; I’ll be keeping in touch whether you like it or not!  Love, Mia x’

I love coming across inscriptions and marginalia like this and will always, categorically always, buy the book when I find something like this written inside.  I kind of can’t believe that Louise gave this book away to a secondhand bookshop so soon after receiving it; I wonder if they fell out, if she didn’t like Dylan Thomas anyway or if, tragically, she lost it on a bus or a park bench and it somehow ended up in Stoke Newington.  I hope it was the latter.

Whenever I post about marginalia or inscriptions, I have the secret hope that somehow, the person who wrote it or the person to whom it was addressed will find me.  In my dream they’d be grateful to me for uncovering their treasure; in my nightmare they’re angry at me for invading their privacy.  In both cases, they would want the book back and I would, of course, comply and return it to its rightful owner.

These personal touches are how we go about making books our own.  It’s something you’ll never have with an ebook.  Long after he’s gone, I’ll still have the copy of The Fountainhead that my dad inscribed with ‘Happy 15th Birthday, sweet pea, etc.’ My mum still faithfully observes the amendments her own mum made to a tortière recipe in the cookbook she passed down.  And years from now, when I am dead and my things are sold, those books will show up in a secondhand bookshop somewhere.  This ensures that the simple stories – the ones more pedestrian than those told in the books they decorate, about families, generations, lovers, fights and apologies, goodbyes and reunions and what those of us who don’t live in lands far far away get up to – will never be forgotten.

Somewhere, someone will find the books in which we’ve shared something about our humanity and despite space and time, they’ll feel the connection to another human being they’ve never known.  It’s an irresistible feeling, one which compels you to by a second copy of a book  you already have or something by an author you hate just to hold onto it.  It’s the feeling that the little stories about human lives are worth keeping.  It’s the certainty that books, the mausoleums that hold those stories and the cathedrals that exalt them, are eternal.

Word on the Water

Word on the Water, Regent’s Canal, London

“So close your eyes while mother sings of the wonderful sights that be,
And you shall see those beautiful things as you sail on the misty sea,
Where the old shoe rocked the fishermen three – Winkin’, Blinkin’, and Nod.”

– From Winkin’, Blinkin’ and Nod, a Nursery Rhyme.

I’ve been in a lot of bookshops and sung their praises, but this one takes the cake. To be fair to them all, those very worthy other bookshops are often just as good as this one in terms of selection, decor and price, but all of them are lacking one essential ingredient that makes this competition not even close to a fair fight.  While every other bookshop I’ve been in has been firmly planted on solid ground, today I set foot inside a floating bookshop on the inside of a London Canal Boat.  You just can’t beat that.

I heard about this mystical creature some time ago and have been trying to track it down for ages.  It moves along Regent’s Canal which cuts through North London from Harrow in the West all the way to the Thames River Basin at Limehouse in the East.  On their facebook and twitter pages, Word on the Water post where on the canal they’re going to be and for how long.  Once or twice I’ve gone to City Road Basin in Angel to try to find them, but always seem to miss the canal boat.  However this time, I just happened upon them by accident.  When I saw the “Floating Book Sale” sign I had a feeling I had accidentally stumbled upon this thing I’d been wanting to find for so long.  This week, the boat is stationed just west of Camden Market on the canal, and a two minute walk from The Blackgull, another amazing Camden bookshop which works brilliantly as the second half of a double feature.  If you’re in that area at all this weekend, you should visit both of them and support two amazing businesses for less than you’d expect.

You might find that you hear the boat before you see the grey plume of smoke rising out from its chimney, as music always seems to be playing from the deck.  If you catch them at the right time, you might be lucky enough to hear one of their live music shows or the poetry readings for which they’re famous.  I’ve never been to one but I hear that music and poetry are shouted out from the deck of the boat to listeners down below and I can only imagine that it must be magical.  But on a weekday at lunch hour, classical music from speakers is perfect.  After examining the paperbacks on sale for £1 or £3 on the deck of the boat (bargain!) and the small selection at the helm, I crouched down and crawled into the cabin, where the magic happens.  The shop’s inside is warmed by the heat of the wood-burning oven in the corner and the couches around it are inviting and cozy.  To live in the cabin of this boat would be a dream come true.  You might be able to grab a spot on the couch and sit for a bit with a book if the cats aren’t monopolising the space.  Yes, there are two little cats (although perhaps there are more, but I only saw two) who live onboard and on this chilly January day they were huddled up on the couch close to the fire.  They must be used to visitors because they didn’t seem to notice me rummaging around the shelves of books that cover the walls.  For such a small space, there is a decent selection of secondhand books, all for very reasonable prices.  I bought Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood for £3.  As with most of the bookshops I frequent, you’re in a real-live establishment, not on Amazon, so they don’t have everything, but I think that forces you to really look at what’s there and invites you to try a book you might not have thought of before.  If you’re not up for these more bookish of adventures, you’ll just have to settle for the charming ambiance and the original idea, which are reason enough to pay the barge a visit, if you can find it.

While I’m on the subject of adventures, despite the frustration of a few failed attempts, I’m very glad to have found this bookshop today by accident.  It goes to show that you can search and search as long as you like for exactly what you want, trying to plan every detail of each day of your life, but in the end, life surprises you.  The plans you made might fall through and one day you might just be glad they did, because the things you never even imagined would happen will come to be the most important moments of your life.  I harp on a lot on this blog about how bookshops are worth saving because they privilege the act of searching over instantaneous finding.  But I think this bookshop doesn’t need to preach that lesson at you because it’s the living proof of it.  You might not find exactly what you’re looking for in such a tiny little bookshop,  but the experience is worth so much more than what you come out with.  To walk along the canal like you do every day and then to come across a boat you’ve never seen which has been styled a “book barge” moored at the side sounds like the beginning of a pirate novel and reminds me of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, in a way.  And I think we all need a little adventure in our lives.

For example.  I recently had to track down a copy of Home to India by Santha Rama Rau for a class I was taking.  There were no copies at Waterstone’s, Foyles, any of my usual local independents, my uni’s library or the University of London and the British Library’s copy was off-site.  I tried all of these places and finally found a copy at SOAS.  After weeks, I finally got my hands on a tiny, weathered red copy of the 1936 edition published by the Left Reading Club, an organisation which operated in the 30s and 40s, disseminating quality literature about leftist ideology among the British intelligentsia and which I had never even heard of before.  Everyone else in my class had ordered the reprinted version from Amazon instead of bothering to look for it.  So, sadly, none of them really got the sense that a text like this, by an Indian woman writing in the 30s about nationalist politics, was not exactly floating around freely.  The experience of tracking down that novel added something to my experience of reading it; its evident rarity really made its revolutionary aspect and its profound modernness (which of course becomes so relativised over time that it’s well-nigh invisible to recognise if you’re not looking for it) all the more real.

The point of that story, which somehow became a very long anecdote, is that oftentimes the adventures we have while looking for books add something special to our experience of them that wouldn’t be there otherwise.  And it’s the sense of discovery, adventure and the fanciful that Word on the Water is bringing back to the book-hunting experience.

On the barge with me today there was a little boy, probably about three years old, admiring a picture book about dinosaurs, which his parents were reading to him (bless them) even though they clearly needed to be on their way.  When they finally managed to get the book out of his hands, the little boy asked if he could drive the boat away.  His parents and another adult in the shop smiled and laughed, in that dismissive way adults do when they’re conspiring to ruin a child’s fun.  I found myself laughing too, but in my heart I thought this little boy is on to something.  For what a perfect fairytale ending would it be to motor off along the partly-frozen canal, into the Thames and out to sea, never to be seen again in a boat full of books?   It reminded me of the nights I feel asleep dreaming of drifting away in a shoe with Winkin’, Blinkin’ and Nod who ‘sailed off on a river of crystal light into a sea of dew.’

Housmans

Housmans, 5 Caledonian Road, London,  N1 9DX

“People do not know how dangerous lovesongs can be, the auric egg of Russell warned occultly. The movements which work revolutions in the world are born out of the dreams and visions in a peasant’s heart on the hillside.”

– James Joyce, Ulysses

I walk past this bookshop almost every day, but until yesterday had never gone in.  I’d occasionally flick through the £1 secondhand books in the cart outside, but always figured I’d get around to actually going in some other day.  Yesterday I finally did and wished I had been going there all along.  Housmans is a quiet little bookshop with wooden floors, crammed shelves and lovely people; just what I like to see.

Housmans calls itself the ‘radical booksellers’ and specialises in communist, socialist, political and economic books, magazines and pamphlets.  Now, up until now I’ve tried to remain relatively apolitical on this blog, simply because that’s just not what this is about.  However, with such an obviously political bookshop, I think I ought to provide some kind of disclaimer, just to prevent cries of “Propagandist!”  I consider myself a politically engaged person and my sympathies invariably fall decidedly left of the centre.  I personally don’t subscribe to Marxism or communism, but I find both fascinating and valuable systems of thought and I think they can and should play some role in the way we interpret our society. Housmans, like any good bookshop, is not trying very hard to push an agenda or to convert anyone; they’re just there as a communal space for learning, the dissemination of ideas and knowledge and the appreciation of all kinds of different books.  So relax.

Naturally, this bookshop has an incredible selection of books about communism, socialism, economics, politics, culture and society.   Many of them are very interesting and they range from generic introductions to different theories and ideology to really nuanced and specific publications.  The shop also has lots of books about society more generally and issues of gender, class and race.  Something I really enjoy about this bookshop is that there is a mixture of media.  Most places I go tend to opt for thick books published by big publishing houses.  (That’s not a criticism!)  But here, you get those more mainstream publications, but also books by independent publishers, magazines and pamphlets.  It’s absolutely always a good idea to expand your normal reading habits by trying new subjects, genres and formats (and by ‘formats’ I do NOT mean Kindles).  Not doing this is something that I too am quite guilty of; once you know what you like you just want to read everything like it that’s ever been published, but if you don’t branch out, your reading experience is poorer for it, I believe.  Perhaps this is a possible New Year’s Resolution for me!

Another notable aspect of the shop is its huge section of London Writing, ranging from Great Expectations to Hackney, That Rose Red Empire by Iain Sinclair.  The shop has a great selection of texts about different regions of London, their histories and their unique struggles.  If, like me, you’re interested in the history of London, the different boroughs, the tube lines and the way the city and its diverse communities took the shape they have today, Housmans is a brilliant place to start looking for information.

And finally, the downstairs, where there are hundreds (maybe thousands?) of secondhand books for ridiculously cheap prices. The majority are a quid.  Obviously there are some beat-up books down there, but a lot of them are still in decent shape and come from genres like fiction, politics, philosophy and poetry. Score!

I bought a book called Why Your Five Year Old Could Not Have Done That by Susie Hodge, which explains the significance (it is there!) of modern art and of specific pieces.  I paid full retail price for it, since it wasn’t secondhand, but I feel okay about that.

Which brings me to one of my favourite things about this bookshop.  Not only are they involved with The Booksellers Association’s ‘Keep Books on the High Street’ campaign, they have also set up their own ‘ethical alternative’ to Amazon.  As any regular reader of this blog knows, I hate Amazon.  However, I realise that I can’t hate by default the idea of ordering books online.  While I may feel that it’s less aesthetically appealing than a creaky old bookshop, I recognise that some people are less able to get to a bookshop because of reduced mobility or isolation and many have had to endure the closure of their local independents.  Besides, a lot of bookshops actually need that extra revenue to stay afloat.  Personally, I always prefer a real bookshop, but I get that there are advantages to buying online.  However grudgingly, I admit it.  My objections are more to the fact that Amazon is trying to monopolise the market at the expense of independents, promoting laziness and undermining the hard work and talent of publishers and authors with cheap prices and self-publishing, which is also responsible for atrocities like 50 Shades of Grey.  However in light of the recent revelations about Amazon UK’s tax dodging (which had me absolutely gleeful, by the way) a lot of people are having second thoughts.  Housmans online store claims to be a more ethical alternative and raises some really interesting points about Amazon’s policies and EVERYONE should read it and join in with the boycott!

My visit to Housmans reminded me of one of the most wonderful things about books.  Even as someone who isn’t wholly convinced by communism (despite a couple of Marxist Students meetings I went to back in the day), I couldn’t have felt more welcome in this bookshop because, of course, you don’t have to be a radical to be interested in radical ideas.  Books, if we open our minds and let them, let us be bigger than ourselves, let us join in with something global, let us leave our own tiny lives behind and experience what it would mean to be somewhere else, be someone else, live some other way.  And if we are willing to let them, those experiences can help us become better, more open and understanding people.

For me, a well-behaved, rule-abiding white girl sitting in her purple-walled room in the suburbs, reading Allen Gibsberg’s Howl for the first time let me be a rebel, a dissenter, a philosopher.  Reading The Diary of Anne Frank made me know what it felt like to be up against a great force of evil. This is the power that books have; to give us new lives and  make us new people, if only for a little while.  But if we’re lucky, we might just end up carrying a little bit of that rebel, that fighter along with us even after we turn the final page.

Book Mongers

Book Mongers,  439 Coldharbour Lane, London, SW9 8LN

This bookshop in the heart of Brixton, I’m delighted to report, is completely mad.  Of course, Brixton itself is delightfully mad too, full of strange people and wonderful people and really random and bizarre sights.   So in a way, this eccentric little shop fits in perfectly.

Frankly, I’m a bit stumped as to how to begin describing the beautiful, beautiful chaos that surrounds you the second you walk in the door of Book Mongers.   I think it’s because it’s not like any other bookshop I’ve ever been in and believe me, I’ve been in a lot.

Book Mongers is absolutely packed full with books.  In the midst of this impressive scale, I needed to come up with a strategy.

I think it’s accurate to say that when I enter a bookshop, the first place I go, in order to orientate myself and establish what kind of shop I’m dealing with, is the Fiction section.  I quickly realised this bookshop resists those kinds of easy generalisations and assumptions, because instead of one coherent and complete Fiction section, there were various shelves labelled the curiousest way I’ve ever seen.  The books were organised into amusing, but somewhat confusing, categories like “European Short Stories”, “American Fiction – Male Authors” and “Modern Scottish Novels”, in addition to a “Fiction” shelf and a “Literature” one on the other side of the shop.  The other impediment to the quick and simple location of a specific book was the fact that on each shelf there were sporadic piles of other books, front covers out to the world, gathering on top of the more obedient books that were waiting, forgotten, in their places on the shelves. In order to find that spine of Kafka’s Metamorphosis, for example, I had to move Into the War by Italo Calvino, A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich  and C.S. Lewis’ The Pilgrim’s Regress (am I the only one who always forgets he wrote more than just Narnia?) out of the way.

In other words, this shop is an absolute nightmare if you’re looking for something specific.

Fortunately, I almost never am.

I enjoy the madness of Book Mongers, possibly because the layers of books remind me a bit of the many bookshelves for whom I’ve acted as keeper over the years.   At one point, in my childhood bedroom, the first of my two bookcases had a couple of shelves where the books were two rows deep.  My meticulously organised mother soon objected to this and tried to rearrange the shelf while I was at school.  It resulted in one of the biggest fights we’ve ever had.

Despite the disorganisation of the shelves, the layout of the shop is very conducive to browsing.  I find I often have the awkward experience in bookshops of having to squat down and tilt my head in a way it shouldn’t be tilted to get a glimpse of the books on the bottom row or two of a shelf.  Rather ingeniously, every cranny in this bookshop is equipped with a chair for snooping, resting, reading or eavesdropping purposes.  An in those crannies you’ll find books on poetry, biography, gardening, cookery, art, architecture, philosophy, psychology, history (seriously, an impressive history collection!), science, music and all kinds of weird categories of fiction as well as one of the biggest collections of literature in foreign languages I’ve seen in any London bookshop, except maybe Skoob.  And they’re all dead cheap, by the way.

Which brings me to my favourite part of Book Mongers: the mezzanine.  Up a couple of stairs is a little alcove with a couch, a very strange arrangement of some disturbing stuffed animals, a bicycle and a desk covered in a books, old magazines and a random statue of a lobster.

The best part of this bit of the shop is that all the books on the walls cost only 50p.  When I see something like that, I sceptically assume (maybe not sceptically; it’s based on lots of experience) that these are the weird, random, kind-of-cool-but-not-enough-to-actually-buy-it kind of books.

But wait!  On these shelves were some actually really good books!  Lots of them were silly beach reads, but there were some old Wordsworth Classics editions of books by writers like Wilkie Collins (okay, so a Victorian beach read, but still),  Dickens and Gaskell as well as children’s books like Anne of Avonlea and The Phantom Tollbooth that made me very nostalgic.  And all for 50p!  I, for one, was just in heaven.

In the end, I submitted to the easy-going, ‘stay a while, don’t worry about it’ feel of the shop and sat on the couch perusing those old favourites about Anne Shirley, her dreaded red hair and her burning desire to change her name to Cordelia.  I actually know a little girl lucky enough to be called Cordelia but, inexplicably, she shirks old King Lear and prefers to go by ‘Coco’ instead, which I think is absurd.  And there we go, somehow, Anne’s got me a million miles away again.

So in the end I didn’t actually buy anything, though I deliberated for a while over a book about the history, production and appreciation of tea which cost £2.50.

I think the wonderful thing about bookshops like this is that you might not go in looking for anything and sometimes you might even come out empty-handed, but that’s not what matters.  After spending a good amount of time admiring lovely old books, discovering new titles, flipping through brittle pages and being surrounded by the gentle smell of paper, you’ve transcended that “must find, must buy” mentality that the world imposes and the internet facilitates.  To pop into Book Mongers, or any fine bookshop, is to pop out of that mentality for a moment.  To spend a little while sitting down, flipping through an old favourite (or a new one) is a rewarding, refreshing and increasingly unappreciated escape into another world.

Week 6: Secondhand Books

Secondhand Books, 20 Lower Marsh, London, SE1 7RJ

Yup, that’s what it’s called.  It’s an unconventional name, but it does the job and for that I’ll give it credit.  Besides, it’s  an unconventional shop.  It seems to fit in on Lower Marsh, where one can find an equally unconventional mix of establishments, including two bars, several Chinese take-aways, a record store that only sells old man music, a 50s American-style diner, a greengrocers, a model train shop, a strange little place that seems to sell a range of toys and accessories for dogs, a card and gift shop, a sex shop, a second-hand clothing store and a sprinkling of little cafes.  Ah, Lower Marsh, one of the most random and hodge-podge streets in London…and one of my favourites.  For the first year I lived in London I was around the corner from it so every morning I walked passed this strange assortment of places without paying too much attention.  So, this week, when trying to decide which bookshop to visit, I thought I really ought to finally get around to checking out the shop I had walked past almost every day for a year and never entered.

The first thing to say about Secondhand Books is that the selection is – how shall we put this kindly… – eclectic.  The genres represented are fiction, poetry, drama, art, music and history.  Of course I may have missed some, as there is little (read: ‘no’) indication of what exactly you’re looking at, but I think that’s about the gist. Yes, the selection is limited.  If you went looking under ‘D’ for ‘Dickens’ you’d be surprised to discover that of the sixteen novels the man wrote, Dombey and Son is the only one to be found.  So, perhaps not the place to go with a specific thing in mind, but still worth the visit.  I find that when you’re presented with fewer novels, instead of being overwhelmed by the sheer number and looking single-mindedly for the thing you want, your mind is opened up to actually look.  Unafraid of being bogged down by a huge number of titles, you can actually see what’s there.  Somehow, I ended up with two books.
The first was an old edition of T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats with illustrations by Nicolas Bentley.  Lovely pictures, but I just can’t get over the spelling of Nicholas without the ‘h’… but we shan’t hold that against him.  Of course, being as geeky and keen as I am, I actually already have the Complete Poems and Plays of T.S. Eliot on my bookshelf, but seeing the illustrated version of the poems on that unfamiliar shelf made me want to buy it anyway (it was £2, so who cares anyway?) in the same way that I’d cling to a vague acquaintance at a party where I don’t know anyone else and the elderly host is breathing down your back…I’ll return to the shopkeeper shortly.  The second book was The Island of the Day Before (£2.50) by Umberto Eco.  I had never heard of this books before and I don’t think it’s one of Eco’s more famous ones.  But then, how would I know, as I’ve never read anything the man’s written? Oh how we surprise ourselves. Incidentally, I read the first paragraph and was enthralled to the point of forgetting the awkwardness of being the onlyone in the shop.

The shop itself is, frankly, strange.  But just as when choosing our books, our music, our food, our partners and our friends we all pick the strangest variety available (we do all do this, right?), the same should be true of bookshops.  The owner is an older man who sits at his desk which is, awkwardly, in the middle of the already-tiny space.  He seems not to notice that you’re standing right in front of him, examining his strange collection.  Incidentally, he seems to be a bit of a traditionalist.  Well, maybe he’s behind the times, but I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt and assuming that he’s perfectly capable of keeping up with progress but has made the conscious decision not to.  Yes that’s right.  Either way, you won’t be able to pay with a card; the lovely gentlemen held my books behind the desk for me while I went in search of a cash machine.

But when I first walked in, he was alone and I greeted him politely but quietly, establishing that I’m just a book-lover browsing, thank you.  While my back was turned away from the door, I thought I heard at least two people walk in, finishing conversations hastily before stepping through the door frame.  But when I craned my neck nosily, I realised that no one had come in, but that the open door allowed this gentleman to sit at his desk all day, clandestinely listening to all the conversations rushing by him on the street outside.  After an initial moment of shame at the thought of the many mindless conversations this man might have overheard spilling out of my own mouth as I passed his shop of an early morning, I arrived at a more appealing thought.  This man, I imagined, is really a writer, maybe even a philosopher, who set up the shop as a cover, a way for him to secretly listen in on conversations, writing down the particularly humorous, insightful or representative comments made by the human race and putting them all in his novel which will surely be very popular, make lots of money, and not be sold in the shop.

Week 1: The Kennington Bookshop

The Kennington Bookshop, 306-8 Kennington Road, SE11 4LD

For my first trick, I won’t venture too far from home.  People ’round these parts say that South London deserves far more credit than it actually gets and in order to right the balance, I’ll proceed to shower this appealing little shop on Kennington Road with accolades.  It looks clean and simple from the outside and in the airy front room, the books are arranged by someone who evidently loves books.  For a geek like me, there’s a certain sense of triumph in the way that little tables are set up throughout the shop in ways that actually make sense. 

My favourite table featured (in an exquisite colour-coded order) Penguin’s Great Ideas series, which are small books filled with the musings of some of the great minds of the literary past, many of them writing about writing, or about reading, or about literature.  I picked up Marcel Proust’s “Days of Reading”, a beautiful little book that only set me back £4.99. Score!

The shop also has a whole section of books about London and about England which, for a phony-Londoner like me, are always interesting, though I don’t like to spend too long looking at them lest someone discover that I am, in fact, just pretending to be a native.  Once again, these books are laid out beautifully by someone who is clearly a reader him/herself.  And I approve.

My favourite thing about this bookshop is that in addition to the pristine upstairs, there’s a downstairs with second hand books which, aside from the sentimental attachment I have to pre-loved books, is always helpful for us poor literature students.

Every time I’ve bought a book in this shop the staff at the till have always been lovely. They’ve talked shop with me, told me how much they love the book I’m buying or, in one situation, warned me not to bother as it doesn’t live up to the hype (who doesn’t appreciate honesty?).  My favourite experience was when their card machines were down and the man at the till had to take my debit card details manually and proceeded to tell me stories of bookselling in “the old days”.  What a star.