 |
 |
   |
|
|
|
|
A Spy In The Bookshop: Letters Between Heywood Hill & John Saumarez Smith, 1965-74Editions
ReviewAn unexpected bestseller in 2004 was The Bookshop At 10 Curzon Street, a little volume of letters between Heywood Hill after his retirement from his bookshop and Nancy Mitford, a friend who had worked there during the war. On the face of it, the book’s selling-point was the Mitford connection, but its appeal is broader because Heywood Hill’s letters are just as good as hers and the portrait that emerges of this remarkable, singular bookshop is spiced up by a complicated row. When Hill retired in 1966 the shop was sold to Henry Vyner, but it was run by Hill’s former colleague Handasyde (‘Handy’) Buchanan and his wife, Mollie, who seems to have been detested by everyone except, possibly, Handy himself. A year before that, John Saumarez Smith was taken on, joining a staff situation that is comic when revealed with forty years hindsight but must have been tortuous at the time. His sympathies were clearly with the Hills but he had to put up with the dreadful Buchanans while trying to do his job as best he could. Snippets from his letters to Heywood Hill, reporting fresh outrages and oddities, inform much of the correspondence between Hill and Mitford. In this new volume we have Hill’s and Saumarez Smith’s own correspondence up to Handy’s retirement, since when Saumarez Smith has run the shop. These letters are written to entertain. As such, they are full of anecdotes recounted with elegance, shrewdness and dry wit. Saumarez Smith’s skilful editing ensures that references are neatly explained and, instead of cloying, the narrow context contributes to the impression of love that the two very-differently aged writers have for the shop and their trade. This shared understanding - the passion for books and the mysterious pleasure to be derived from providing people with the right book – underlies all the grumbling and the tittle-tattle. And there is lot of grumbling. ‘The Shop Row’ really is extraordinary. Heywood Hill sold up rather than endure the Buchanans any longer, and his only subsequent contact with the shop he had built was through his young ‘spy’. Vyner likewise quickly became fed up with the ‘dead dodgy’ Buchanans and extracted himself. The other member of staff was obviously extremely tricky, and the wonder is that Saumarez Smith endured the situation. It is surprising that any small business could function for long with such dislike and mistrust among the staff, but it’s amazing to think of it existing for so long in such an intimate shop, with its unique reputation for personal service. And there is a lot of tittle-tattle.The pages abound with dukes and duchesses, Mellons and Kennedys, ‘a couple of young Astors’, Gerald and Osbert and Eddie. But it would be quite wrong to describe this as name-dropping, for these really are the clients and friends who form the world behind the letters: and the reason why the two authors are supremely good at what they do is that they are interested in people as well as books. Now, it’s almost incredible that the world could still have seemed so ordered that a single mention of Jean Shrimpton should leap out like juke box lights in a cathedral. But perhaps this is less surprising in a dialogue between two men who are forty years apart in age, and who in fact don’t know each other very well (and had to keep their communications secret from the Buchanans), than the fact that their shared love of the shop was sufficient to maintain their communication at all. It is rather touching. Having worked at Heywood Hill briefly in the 1980s - and being a cousin, moreover, of John SS - it may be inevitable that I should enjoy these letters. But I think that anyone who knows the shop would find them riveting, and even those who don’t but have something of the authors’ passion for books and people will find them fascinating. It is gratifying, moreover, to find Hill writing in 1974, ‘I am sometimes asked by my neighbours where they can get some difficult book… I usually, out of kindness, tell them to go to John Sandoe.’ - review by Johnny de Falbe |
|
John Sandoe [Books] Ltd |
Fax:
020 7581 2084