I have frequently commented on cafes and on the facility they offer me to write. Oddly I have had far less to say about bookshops. It is time to make good this deficit.
My family will confirm that I am rarely to be seen without a book about my person, and that I’ve been known to defy sociability by secreting one about my person even when in relaxed and relaxing company. I plead guilty, if with mitigation. I need to read to write.
I have been enamoured of books and bookshops ever since my undergraduate days at Surrey University. It is, I guess, a tribute to my teachers there that I not only love browsing in bookshops but that I aim first and fastest to the non-fiction shelves with volumes on philosophy and social theory. On reflection, while I long scanned philosophy sections as my priority, this has over time changed: I now direct my initial curiosity at social theory. If pushed I would go so far as to say that I now consider social theory more ‘basic’ or ‘foundational’ than philosophy, but that’s for another day.
My undergraduate enthusiasm was fired during my first year based in Battersea in 1968/69. This gave me ready access to London’s grandest bookshops. When I started my first job, at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital Medical School in 1972, I began what became a lifetime’s work based in London. I grew familiar with the then-haphazard jumble that was Foyles and, above all, to the then London University bookshop Dillons (opposite UCL). I spent many contented hours, even on what was in those early years a parsimonious income, editing down my choice of purchase(s), in the process accumulating office and home libraries of many thousands of books. Over time Dillons was to be ‘chained’ into a Waterstones, with a consequent degree of autonomy lost to its manager. Waterstones have since proliferated in London. Foyles on Tottenham Court Road meanwhile has been modernised; it has also spawned branches on the South Bank and, until recently, on Waterloo Station (and for all I know elsewhere). I’m not fussy, just a little nostalgic for the past. Still surviving, I’m delighted to confirm, is Bookmarks at 1 Bloomsbury Street, a radical outlet in which I’ve long chased down Marxist and other works.
One benefit of the ‘new’ chain orientation, however, has been the (American) habit of incorporating cafes into bookshops! I eagerly await the next (American) transition, namely, an acceptance of customers taking piles of books into the cafes prior to, or even instead of, purchasing them, either to browse or in the case of students to do research. When Annette and I were visiting professors at Emory University in Atlanta in 1998 we spent many contented evenings in stores like Barnes and Noble just perusing books on their shelves and in their cafes.
London has more than its share of second-hand bookshops of course, and it is to these that I frequently repaired, prior to retirement and since. Charing Cross Road was home-from-home from the 1970s onwards. Although a few have disappeared over the years, sabotaged by unreasonable rent increases, Any Amount of Books remains. In fact, it was their manager who bought my vast residue of books when I retired in 2013, paying me £1,000 (and getting a good deal).
But all this fails to capture the magic of perusing bookshop shelves. Maybe it is an academic mindset to be curious about almost everything, though I’m sure many non-academics would eagerly search out local bookshops, even abroad, and even when the total stock is in another language (I did once read a book on medieval philosophy in French during a family holiday in Carnac, helped by the familiarity of the technical terms). Bookshops, especially independent or second-hand bookshops, are potent magnets, just as they are for Robin Ince (see his vastly entertaining Bibiomaniac: An Obsessive’s Tour of the Bookshops of Britain). Part of the pleasure is not knowing what to expect. Who knows what the second or bottom row of books will contain? An out-of-print classic? A book unseen since undergraduate days? One written by a teacher, colleague or friend? A text on a topic one happens to be writing about at the time? One strange piece of behaviour I’ve noticed is that I will almost invariably find something in such a bookshop to buy, even though I wouldn’t dream of buying that same book in a regular bookshop. I suspect other ‘bibiomaniacs’ will recognise and understand this irrational impulse.
So bookshops and cafes are my second homes, ideally under the same roof. If I were to be asked to specify a few favourite haunts it wouldn’t be that difficult. For all that pretty much any bookshop will do, I hanker after certain ports of call. When visiting Oxford, which I did for many years when giving an annual lecture to Ray Fitzpatrick and Crispin Jenkinson’s medical student intakes, I always made time for Blackwells, that multi-level meandering homage to specialist readerships. Through the back and down the steps to the sociology and philosophy sections, then maybe a pint in the old pub next door to eavesdrop on esoteric conversation and to inspect my purchases. And in Cambridge, where daughter Rebecca resides, and where I also used to give regular talks to students, including one after-dinner effort, the bookshop of choice is of course Heffers, another resort for academic or specialist readers. If Heffers doesn’t lend itself to new purchases (rare), then there’s always another well-stocked Waterstones, a decent Oxfam bookshop or, failing that, a wonderful bookstall in the marketplace. University cities and towns do tend to have precious collections, at least for people like me.
I close with a confession. It dates back to the early 1980s and my days at the Middlesex Hospital Medical School. I was attending a book launch-cum-author-debate in Dillons. I can’t remember who the author was, but I do recall consuming several glasses of white wine, roaming up and down the several floors and, finding myself in the basement where the medical books were kept, thinking it an excellent and benevolent gesture to sign an entire row of first editions of Sociology as Applied to Medicine textbooks. Incidentally, it was whilst inspecting the second edition of this same book on this same shelf that I was later to discover that the publishers, Bailliere Tindall, had mistakenly reprinted the first edition in second edition covers! When I informed them, all had of course to be withdrawn; it must have cost them!
I cannot resist adding that for a brief period, lasting a few weeks I think, I had a short row of my books recognised in Dillons sociology section by a printed label – GRAHAM SCAMBLER – stuck to a shelf and sandwiched between far more illustrious predecessors. But my moment in the sun of the second floor was to prove short-lived.