18 Bookshops E-Book

Anne Scott

• Herausgeber: Sandstone Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Anne Scott has never housed her books in order of theme or author yet she knows where each of them is and the kind of life it has led. Some have been gifts but most have been chosen in bookshops unique in their style and possibilities. Gradually some of the shops become partners with her as her life changes and so do they. They have been observers of discovery, decisions, and marvels with her, following the line of her time and place. Some are everyday shops with a shelf of books in a corner, some are beginning again after long lives as churches, printing presses, medieval houses, a petrol-station. There are a few the author is too late to see: early print-houses and booksellers. They are here too in this book, searched for and described, side by side with all the bookshops open now and busy with readers. This book is about them. Not one is like another. In one way, the book is a sequence about writing. But first it is a map of books and a life.

Leseprobe

Anne Scott lectures in literature and has also been a BBC Scotland broadcaster and occasional writer for The Scotsman and The Herald in the 1990s. She studied at Edinburgh and married there, and her son, Mike, is a successful song-writer and musician.

When she was nine a bookseller folded a bookmark with a red cord into her newly-purchased book and that was the beginning of her love affair with books and bookshops.Working visits to Ann Arbor and Kansas in the 1980s, and later to New York City, Dublin and Galway, helped define her professional work as an extended study of Irish and American writing.There were so many writers in Ireland and America, so many bookshops in the world, together they turned her into a searcher.

She lives in the West of Scotland.

First published in Great Britain by

Sandstone Press Ltd

PO Box 5725

One High Street

Dingwall

Ross-shire

IV15 9WJ

Scotland.

www.sandstonepress.com

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.

Editor: Robert Davidson

© Anne Scott 2011

The moral right of Anne Scott to be recognised as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patent Act, 1988.

ISBN: 978-1-905207-71-8

Sandstone Press is committed to a sustainable future in publishing, marrying the needs of the company and our readers with those of the wider environment. This book is made from paper certified by the Forest Stewardship Council.

Ebook by Iolaire Typesetting, Newtonmore

Acknowledgements and Dedication

The author and publisher gratefully acknowledge the quotations which have been utilised in 18 Bookshops.

In the chapter on Leakey’s Bookshop in Inverness the lines beginning ‘The end of all our exploring . . .’ are from Little Gidding by T.S. Eliot, and come from The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot published by Faber & Faber Ltd, London in 1969.

In the chapter on Books of Wonder in New York City the discourse beginning ‘So it’s true,’ he thought . . .’ are from The Mysteries of Harris Burdick by Chris van Allsburg published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, Boston in 1984.

In the chapter on Bauermeister’s Bookshop in Edinburgh the lines beginning ‘So I give her this month . . .’ and later ‘So that if now . . .’ are from Autumn Journal by Louis MacNeice published by Faber & Faber Ltd, London in 1939.

In the chapter on The Atlantis Bookshop in London the lines ‘passing moments in a single day’ and ‘miraculous, the exercises in attention and observations’ are from In Search of the Miraculous: Fragments of an Unknown Teaching by Piotr Ouspensky published by Routledge, London in 1949.

In the chapter on Carraroe, Connemara, the poem Dwelling Place is original, by the book’s author, Anne Scott.

The principle of fair dealing has been observed throughout.

* * *

Thanks especially to Mike Scott and Michael Hawkins.

Contents

Title Page

Acknowledgements and Dedication

First . . .

1. Compendium Bookshop, Camden: The Spread Sail

2. Chepman and Myllar, Edinburgh 1507-1510: Three Years’ Light

3. The Parrot, St Paul’s Churchyard, London 1609: These to be Solde by Wm Aspley at His Shop

4. The Old Printing Press Bookshop, Iona: Reckoning

5. Leakey’s Bookshop, Inverness: Little Gidding

6. William Templeton’s Bookshop, Irvine 1782: The Crossing Place

7. Smith’s, 1 Antigua Street, Edinburgh: The Lighted Stage

8. Atholl Browse Bookshop, Blair Atholl: Stopping Place

9. The Grail Bookshop, Edinburgh: No wealth but Life

10. Books of Wonder, New York City: The Colour of Hudson Street

11. The Turl Bookshop, Oxford: If it were lost, then how?

12. Thomas Davies’s Bookshop, 8 Russell Street, Covent Garden 1763: The Actor, his Bookshop, Samuel Johnson and James Boswell

13. Watkins Bookshop, Cecil Court, London: Through

14. King’s Bookshop, Callander: The Reading Garden

15. Bauermeister’s Bookshop, Edinburgh: Leaving

16. Carraroe, Connemara: Henry James at Home

17. Kenny’s Bookshop, Galway: How to be in Ireland

18. Atlantis Bookshop, London: A Light to Shine Before

First . . .

For a year or two when I was a child, my older brother bought a Penguin book each Saturday morning, and he took me with him. The bookshop he liked was curved inside like a longboat, with the Penguins up in the bows ranged out in the stripes of their covers, white with orange, pink, green, dark blue.

Green Saturdays meant he was on holiday and reading mysteries: pink, he wanted to be travelling in the Kalahari, to Marrakesh, the South Seas: dark blue meant people’s lives, orange was stories. The Penguins were flat like chocolate bars, and perfect to touch. He collected hardcover books too – bought without me – shining narrow volumes about drawing, and after a while we had to go to Crawford’s second-hand furniture room to buy a book-case, carefully searching out the kind with shelves at different levels.

One Saturday a few weeks later, as we walked through the town, I saw an empty orange-box outside Horne’s grocery: slender cream wood with a broad middle spar and a picture of bright oranges on the top.

‘Look!’ I whispered to him. ‘Shelves!’

‘Go on in,’ he said. ‘See if he’ll give it to you.’

He did and we took it home. By evening my few books were in: my school bible, my red dictionary, Grey Owl, Robinson Crusoe, and my annuals laid flat on the low shelf.

The first books I owned smelt all their lives of tangerines.

The next week in our bookshop my brother bought a paperback for me too, my choice, The Family from One End Street by Eve Garnett. The bookseller made me a present of a bookmark with a red cord and placed it in at page one. Then we all went up into the bows of the longboat to buy my brother’s Penguin.

I think this book was born that day.

1. Compendium Bookshop, Camden:The Spread Sail

In the summer of 1968 in an Edinburgh bookshop I discovered a guidebook by a born Londoner and new spy storywriter, Len Deighton. This was London Dossier, designed for someone who needed to know how to have a week in London on very little money, culturally well and as safely as possible. Me.

I wintered it into my head and in 1969, about the time the Woodstock Festival was tuning up, set off south with my ten-year-old son in a two-berth sleeper from Waverley Station. I booked us into The Mount Pleasant Hotel and we took London into our lives.

Map in hand, he mastered the Tube system and we rode south to the River, circled to the centre for music magazines and records, and one day followed Len Deighton on the Northern Line to Marine Ices in Chalk Farm – I still feel the thrill in the words – and that evening we crossed the road from there to see Nicol Williamson as Hamlet at The Roundhouse.

The Dossier became a second adult in our plans and if it had been written a year later, it would surely have shown us the way to Compendium Books, a new, unique, and never-matched marvel of shelves and titles, opened first in 1968 at 240 Camden High Street, extended in 1972 to include number 281, and then consolidated at 234 where I found it at last in the summer of 1975.

It had been open only some weeks. Work to do with wood was still in progress. The shop smelt of its pine shelves shining white. The books were fat and thin, bright-sleeved, very tempting to touch. I thought I knew books but there were so many strangers here, whole streets of foreign covers and names, philosophers I had never read, Portuguese poets, African novelists. As the Franco dictatorship drew to a close, Miguel Hernandez poetry was here on the shelves and Federico Garcia Lorca’s Blood Wedding, The House of Bernarda Alba: Latin Americans Pablo Neruda, and Jorge Luis Borges whom I knew only as an inspiration to James Kennaway writing novels in Scotland a decade before. The aisles were lined with esoteric books and Ann Shepherd was assembling what was the first big collection of Mind and Spirit books in Britain.

I wish I had been in at the start back in 1968 when Nick Kimberley was building the poetry sections with authors far and far beyond the reach of other bookshops. Now in 1975 he was bringing them here: the New York poets – Frank O’Hara (whom somehow I missed until I found his poems much later in New York), John Ashbery, Charles Olsen: San Francisco editions from the City Lights Bookshop, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, of course, but also his poetry and a copy of Trip-Trap, the book of Haiku he wrote at Thanksgiving in 1959 on another road journey, from San Francisco to Long Island to visit his mother.