Cornflower Books

Books from Boots

    I've known for many years that Boots the chemist used to have very popular lending libraries in their shops, but I knew little more than that until I saw mention of them this morning and looked them up.

     This article gives a lot of fascinating detail: two classes of membership, personal service, Cary Grant!! I'm tempted to read Jackie Winter's book and discover the full story, but how times have changed!

Window-dressing

    "[Books] have voices; and our job as window dresser was to see that they were saying the right thing to the right people in the most effective way.

    So we were like the puppeteer who, standing unseen, pulls unseen strings; or like the conductor of the orchestra who, silent himself, gets the best from each instrumentalist. Each book has its own individual voice, saying 'I am me: buy me!' Some books say this very loudly, clearly and persuasively. You put them in the window and people at once know all about them and come hurrying in for them. These are our soloists, and probably our best soloist when we opened was The Cruel Sea. Other books are better in chorus. 'We are cookery books. We are gardening books. There are lots more of us inside.' Some books speak for themselves. Books with titles like Devon or Sea Fishing for Beginners need no help from us: they say exactly what they are. But Jim Davis needs a little notice pointing out that it is an exciting smuggling story with a Dartmouth setting. Only those with the best voices qualify for the window or for display face forwards inside the shop, and each must be carefully chosen not just for what it has to say but to whom we want it said..."

    From The Path through the Trees by Christopher Milne.

    Christopher Milne (1920-1996) was the son of A.A. Milne, immortalised of course as 'Christopher Robin'. He and his wife Lesley owned and ran The Harbour Bookshop in Dartmouth, Devon from the early 1951 to 1983. The shop sadly closed some years ago.

Bookshop open!

    Here in Scotland bookshops re-opened this week. We popped up to Topping & Co. this morning and bought the above: the A.J. Ayer is Mr. C's, we'll both read Edmund de Waal's acclaimed Letters to Camondo and Leo Marks's* Between Silk and Cyanide, while the Christopher Lloyd and Paula Byrne's biography of Barbara Pym are for me.

*Leo Marks was the son of Benjamin Marks of Marks & Co, the bookshop at the heart of Helene Hanff's 84, Charing Cross Road.

To the bookshop

    Lovely to browse in a bookshop* again!

(If you follow the link to Topping & Co., do scroll down for some interesting recommendations.)

At your service - postscript

    Further to this post, Edinburgh's Topping & Co. say that they'll "pop round with books or anything else you need" if you're nearby, or they'll post for £2 (free for orders over £50).

At your service

    Little Toller are offering free postage on all UK orders (Clare Leighton, for example).

    Mainstreet Trading don't have an online shop but they will pop a book - or items from their very nice delicatessen - in the post; contact details on their website.

    Heywood Hill reminds us that books have always been an antidote to isolation, and they stand ready to send their Spring reading bundles, monthly subscriptions, or a box of books chosen specially for you, anywhere in the world.

    John Sandoe Books also welcomes telephone or email orders and refers us to their online catalogues "or anything else you would like, from Brer Rabbit to Baudelaire, Noggin the Nog to Nabokov".

    Blackwell's online orders are always post-free in the UK.

Edited to add: Juxtabook/Catherine is also offering free UK postage on books bought from her business CL Hawley Books - until the end of April use the code ukfreepost at checkout.

Friends old and new

    "If you cannot read all your books...fondle them - peer into them, let them fall open where they will, read from the first sentence that arrests the eye, set them back on the shelves with your own hands, arrange them on your own plan so that you at least know where they are. Let them be your friends; let them, at any rate, be your acquaintances."

    I've taken those lines of Churchill's from Louise Penny's November newsletter; while "arranged" doesn't really apply to the shelves above, I do know where things are, and the mixture of the eagerly anticipated and the already loved is a comforting one - good old friends and attractive new acquaintances, side by side.

Now, where were we?

    Bit of an unplanned absence there - I was away for a few days (including a second literary pilgrimage here), and recent reads haven't felt terribly post-worthy, so the blog has been becalmed, but let's see if we can get some wind back in the sails.

    I popped into Topping & Co. yesterday to buy Andrew Whitley's book on sourdough (having made a loaf, following instructions in a general cookbook, which would not have looked out of place in the Ashmolean's Last Supper in Pompeii exhibit), and I picked up a copy of 4th Estate's free booklet The World of Wolf Hall: a reading guide to Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies, to prime us for The Mirror and the Light (out in March and a wrist-breaking 864 pages, apparently). 

    A browse round Blackwell's Broad Street shop when I was in the south resulted in a couple of additions to my Christmas wish list: DJ Taylor's Lost Girls: Love, War and Literature 1939-1951 and Christina Hardyment's Novel Houses: Twenty Famous Fictional Dwellings, meanwhile the Persephone Biannually arrived and caused the placing of an order: a DE Stevenson, Stella Martin Currey's One Woman's Year (which I shall keep for January), and Milton Place by Elisabeth de Waal which has started very promisingly. 

    Elsewhere in the family, daughters have been reading Oscar Wilde and Donna Tartt, and Mr. C. is deep in the Mick Herron canon and promises a post "soon". It was Adèle who put him on to MH, and the baton has been duly passed to the Hussar who sped through the Jackson Lamb series in no time. Incidentally, I sent him this picture of the George Macdonald Fraser novels taken in Toppings, 

saying these shelves ought to have a warning affixed: "reads these books at your peril - a career in the military awaits". He replied, "excellent preparation for a life of adventure!"; he read them as a teenager and has ended up in the modern incarnation of Flashman's regiment, which says something, does it not, about the power of literature!

    Anyway, I'm glad to be back and I hope you are all well and thriving and finding good things to read.

I popped back ...

    ... to Topping & Company this morning, and with fewer customers than on Sunday there was more space to browse (and have coffee by the window in 'Fiction', should you choose). 

    The range of the stock is astonishingly large and good so choosing is hard, but I came away with these two.

Tip-top

    The excellent Topping & Company have this morning opened their new Edinburgh shop, and while some finishing touches are still being added, it looks splendid: light and airy (it's in a William Playfair building on a corner site in the East New Town so it has high, arched windows), it ranges over two floors through many rooms and nooks and crannies, and when the shelves are full they will house 70,000 titles.

    It was extremely busy when we were there so we have decided to go back* for a quieter browse later in the week, but despite the crush we made a few purchases: mine are shown above (the card is Vanessa Bell's Interior with the Artist's Daughter), while Mr. C. bought three books and is deep in the first of them (a Mick Herron) as I write.

    Do visit if you get the chance.

*Dangerously, it is within walking distance of home, and another point in its favour, as you'll deduce from the pictures, Toppings welcomes canine customers.

This and that

    Carolyne Larrington's interesting talk on The Poetic Edda makes reference to William Morris, Wagner, and Game of Thrones (as yet unread and unwatched by me - anyone here a fan?).

                                                ~~~~~

    Here's an article to add to our occasional writers' notebooks series of posts - Robert Macfarlane on his 'underground' stationery.

                                               ~~~~~

    Sir Tim Waterstone was a recent guest of Georgina Godwin's on Meet the Writers; listen to his interview here.

Persephone Books in The New York Times

    Good article here.

The Librarian

 

    There's much to enjoy in Salley Vickers' The Librarian, a small-canvas story of an English town in 1958.

    Sylvia Blackwell arrives to take up the position of Children's Librarian, aiming to revitalise the outdated collection and instil in her young clientele a love of reading. She comes up against entrenched attitudes, a strict social order, snobbery and prejudice, but also finds neighbourly solidarity, unlikely allegiances, and love - of a sort. What happens during Sylvia's tenure in East Mole threatens to split the community, but also has far-reaching consequences for those she has inspired.

    It starts off promisingly with reference to Sylvia's own childhood experience of encountering fictional characters who were "a shaping influence and an inner guide", and in so far as the children in the novel similarly find role models or discover new worlds - of one sort or another - within the books they read, that theme is worked through, but elsewhere there is some unsubtle soapbox stuff, and then fascinating ideas such as elective affinities*, so-called irrelevant DNA, psychic communication, and JBS Haldane, are mentioned in passing and left by the way. Plot-wise there's a lot riding on Sylvia, but does this self-appointed "angel of enlightenment" have the personal heft to support the role? I'm not sure that she does, though perhaps she's intended to be less driving force than driven one.

    As to the books which figure, Tom's Midnight Garden is prominent, and there's a helpful list of "East Mole Library recommended reading", itself a snapshot of an age, at the back. That in the novel's short Part Two we discover the very best extent of the ripple effect an early exposure to literature can have is a fitting - and neat - ending to what at times is a slightly meandering story, but a good one nonetheless.

    

*See also.

John Sandoe recommends

    John Sandoe have published their selection of books for the new year; here are some that particularly caught my eye:

    Joyride: To a Reunion at Kardamyli, Tony Scotland

    The Man who was Saturday: The Extraordinary Life of Airey Neave, Patrick Bishop

    The Face Pressed against a Window: A Memoir, Tim Waterstone

    Threads of Life: A History of the World though the Eye of a Needle, Clare Hunter

    Season Songs, Ted Hughes

    Clifford Webb: Illustrator and Wood Engraver, Simon Brett

    Japanese Gardens: A Journey, Monty Don

    Copsford, Walter J.C. Murray

    The Well-Gardened Mind, Sue Stuart-Smith

Library book

 

    A while ago I posted a few of Harry Cory Wright's photographs from The Library of Trinity College Dublin, his pocket-sized portrait of that breathtaking building. Since then Typepad seems to have changed their settings and pictures here are appearing far less sharp than they should be, so I won't attempt to add to that gallery today, but I shall commend the book for its evocative images of age and venerability, learning and scholarship, craftsmanship and  continuity.

    In her introduction, Librarian and College Archivist Helen Shenton recalls her first impressions of the place:

    "I first stepped onto the balcony of the Long Room - frequently described as 'the most beautiful room in Ireland', and often called 'the most magnificent library in the world' - early one summer morning as the soft, dust-speckled sunbeams radiated diagonally across the room. Cleric and historian Gerald of Wales (1146-1223) described the Book of Kildare (an early medieval Gospel manuscript - now lost - that is believed to have been similar to our Book of Kells) as 'the result of the work, not of men, but of angels'. On my first visit to the Long Room, it felt as if such ethereal beings might gently float down the early morning shafts of sunlight [...] Looking down at the 200,000 volumes in the handsome, dark, oak bookcases in the soft morning light, I was profoundly moved by the beauty, the stillness, the history, the accumulation of knowledge..."

    Helen goes on to talk about visitors' reactions, from the tear in the eye, the expressions of awe, the lowering of voices, and the many comments, especially from younger people, on the books' scent - "the sweet note is attributable to furfural," she says, "the smell from ageing cellulose in paper; it is similar to the smell of almonds, which contain the same chemical."

    A working, living library still, it has featured in films such as Educating Rita, and The Professor and the Madman, and was George Lucas's inspiration for the Jedi Archive in Star Wars: Episode 2, but its atmosphere - though magnificently conveyed by Harry Cory Wright's pictures - is best sensed in person:

    "At night, or in the depths of one of those dark, dour November afternoons in Dublin when all colour seems to have drained from the world, the Long Room is as moving as it is in the soft light of early morning. When all the people have gone and the doors are closed, the eye is drawn through the gloaming, along the lines of busts, to the 'darkness visible' and to the palpable sense of the infinite."

This and that

  

 

    Although ours is a very doggy household (see also the writers' dogs) I must mention the British Library's exhibition Cats on the Page which opens tomorrow and coincides with the 80th anniversary of publication of T.S. Eliot's Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats.

    On show will be original illustrations by Judith Kerr, Quentin Blake, Beatrix Potter, and Axel Scheffler; there will be sound recordings, Lear doodles, a 16th. century pamphlet on witchcraft including a black cat 'familiar', and more. Judith Kerr herself will be there at a special event on 3rd. December when she will be in conversation with her art editor. 

 

    Heywood Hill have just published their Christmas gift guide and you can have a virtual browse here. I have my eye on Kate Hubbard's Devices and Desires: Bess of Hardwick and the Building of Elizabethan England,  The Gardens of Bunny Mellon by Linda Jane Holden and Roger Foley, Magnus Nilsson's The Nordic Baking Book (he's talking about it here), and Sebastian Faulks's Paris Echo.

    If you're looking for an extra-special present, I can recommend Heywood Hill's A Year in Books subscription service. I recently gave Mr. C. the P.G. Wodehouse version, and his words on opening last month's beautifully wrapped parcel were, "It goes from treat to treat!".

 

 

    

    I'm not sponsored by Slightly Foxed but they are a source of so many good things that I mention them often. Their November newsletter includes a delightful article by Ken Haigh which appeared in Issue no. 53; click here and scroll down to read The Book Cure.

Browsing and buying

    Does the fact that the Norrington Room's Philosophy Help Desk was unmanned when I was there the other day suggest that it was the nihilists' shift or perhaps the immaterialists'? "Come back at noon for a platonist, or at 3.00 if it's nominalism you're after..." It reminded me of this.

    Enough nonsense - Blackwell's yielded several books, as the photograph shows. I'm looking to Nigel Warburton's A Little History of Philosophy to fill the (many, large) gaps in my knowledge. Julian Baggini says of it, "Warburton packs a heck of a lot into what is something of a Goldilocks volume: neither too much nor too little, the exegesis neither too thin or too thick and lumpy, his Little History can be consumed as a nourishing treat in its own right or provide the perfect fuel to kickstart anyone's journey into philosophy."

    Matthew Dennison's Eternal Boy: The Life of Kenneth Grahame is, I fear, a very sad tale as the author "charts with consummate poignancy the life of the author of The Wind in the Willows - from bookish bachelorhood to the torment of an emotionally arid marriage touched by tragedy".

    Ronald Blythe's In the Artist's Garden was, as this post shows, among the delights of last year's reading. His The Time by the Sea: Aldeburgh 1955-1958 looks at his involvement in the early years of Benjamin Britten's Festival. "It is a tale of music and painting, creativity and landscape. It describes the first steps of an East Anglian journey, an intimate appraisal of a vivid and memorable time." D.J. Taylor calls it "one of the best thing [Blythe] has written".

    In the bookshop's spirituality section I came upon Living on the Border: Reflections on the Experience of Threshold by Esther de Waal - "There is a traditional saying of ancient wisdom: 'A threshold is a sacred thing.' In some places of the world, in some traditional cultures and in monastic life, this is still remembered. It is something, however, that we often forget today. To take time to pause at a threshold - be it a place, or a moment between one action and the next - is to show reverence for the handling of space and time, and respect for those we meet. Pausing allows us to let go of all the demands and expectations of the previous activity, and to prepare for the encounter with another. In company with the poets and artists of the Welsh border country in which she lives, Esther de Waal explores what this ancient wisdom has to teach us about our public lives in the world today."

Back Mr. B's

    Bath bookshop Mr. B's Emporium is crowdfunding in order to expand its premises. The video above tells all, and you can find the sponsorship details here. By the time I visited the page all the 'Join the Crew' experiences, by which you can be a bookseller for a day (and which I'd have loved) had already been claimed, but if you're minded to offer your support, there are many more excellent rewards on offer as I write.

Behind the scenes at the bookshop

    Snapped at Mainstreet Trading today, bags for Kate Atkinson's new novel Transcription; the attached note says they are not to be used before publication date (6th. September). Coincidentally, I started the book yesterday and am loving it so far, following young Juliet Armstrong to MI5 in 1940 ... Can't wait to read on.

Library steps

    From The Library of Trinity College Dublin, Harry Cory Wright; more on the book soon.