The third floor was a labyrinth of dark oak passageways and shelves containing cracked, embossed spines. The second floor showcased an array of local literature – birds, flora and frolicking frogs of Cumbria – antique maps and paintings of colossal prize-winning Belted Galloway cows. The ground floor of the building was under siege from clone-like marching legions of paperbacks, the sale of which, presumably, uncle Arthur made a living from. It was a four-storey townhouse, rammed to the rafters with texts, old and new, that I had very little interest in. She also liked to check that Arthur, who was well into his seventies, and neither a moderate hip flask appreciator nor the tidiest shopkeeper, hadn't been crushed under a teetering stack of encyclopedias.ĭespite the appeal of seeing my brother with a small angry dog attached to his trousers, going into the shop made me twitchy. And he had a Jack Russell called Patch that would savage my brother's trouser leg, for no discernable reason, every time we went into the shop. What wasn't to like? He'd been a pilot in the war. Not exactly prime location given today's high street preferences, but back then bookshops often seemed secluded, almost requiring SAS field skills to find. It was tucked away behind the church, next to an old covered market where you could buy anything from saddlery to Sauron's ring. My great uncle Arthur used to run an independent in my hometown of Penrith.
I used to dislike bookshops immensely as a child and was won over only later in life.
My affection for bookshops has followed a reverse trajectory. Such places became "too closely associated … with paranoiac customers and dead bluebottles".
In his essay Bookshop Memories, George Orwell tells how his enjoyment of secondhand bookshops was ruined when he worked in one.
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