Bury My Heart At W. H. Smith’s. Brian Aldiss
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old man, he asked, ‘When would you be prepared to start?’
‘Now?’ I asked.
‘Now,’ he said. I was set to tidying the shilling shelves. I remember one of the books I tidied, that first afternoon. It was Lalla Rookh by Tom Moore, a friend of Byron’s. Time was when no self-respecting home was without a copy of Lalla Rookh. Many editions came off the mills, some bound in Russian leather, padded with cotton wool.
Moore was a jolly man, ever prepared to sing for his supper, and he had a sharp, observant eye, as his diaries show. Sad to say, many copies of Lalla Rookh went out to Sanders’ shilling shelves during my time there. Every dog his day …
A rich but chastening environment for a budding author is a bookshop.
Sanders’ shop is a long narrow dark secretive overstocked gallimaufry of a bookshop, comparing unfavourably in roominess with the crew quarters of one of Nelson’s ships. Packed under its low beams is a profusion of ill-sorted stock. From folios to duodecimos, an impressive range of volumes presents itself or lurks in obscurity.
Nor are there only books here. Maps, prints, engravings, hang wherever there is space. These are Sanders’ specialities. The old maps – Speeds, Saxtons, Mordens – mainly of the English counties, mop up what light filters in from outside while remaining themselves beautiful, cryptic, and severe in their Hogarth frames. The elegance of those frames!
Halfway towards the rear of the shop is a door which gives on to a twisting stair which leads up to Mr Sanders’ office and, beyond that, the rare book room where few are allowed to go. On the staircase is a framed engraving of Dr Johnson short-sightedly reading a 32mo.
Mind your head as we get to the rear compartment of the shop downstairs. Here, besides rows of books small and gigantic, such as Mrs Jekyll’s Country Life books, we come to the stove, a desk, a gate cutting off the cellar, and the till.
The till is a wooden affair with a narrow slot in its top, through which one may write on a roll of paper
Ensor’s England … … 1. 1. 0.
The till opens with a ting, the paper drum rolls on, and the assistant deposits a guinea in the correct wooden partitions.
Above the till is a window which allows a ration of light into this section of the shop, although the ration is so feeble that electric lights burn all day. The window is partly obscured by an old hurdy-gurdy which hangs there. It is Italian, and has to be tucked under the chin like a violin and wound by a small handle. Occasionally, Sanders, a music-lover, will take it down and play a melody.
Oh, yes, a strong whiff of the nineteenth century still clings to Sanders’ shop. This is the first taste I have had of England since I was a child when, at seventeen, I was swallowed up into the British Army. I am intoxicated by the strangeness of everything. I half-read all the books, flitting from one to another, while at the same time dreaming my private dreams of sex and science fiction.
Beyond the hurdy-gurdy is a last section, filled in part by a small office and a packing booth. The books here, tucked at the rear of the shop, are of less tempting varieties. This is the resort of Classical textbooks, Agriculture and Logic. There is also a narrow space behind the Classics, very unpopular with assistants, in which some stationery is housed: the humdrum things that students need, particularly the students from Oriel College, next to the shop, such as loose-leaf books, refills for same, pencils, notebooks, and the like.
In the office sits Mrs Y. In the packing booth stands Mr Watts.
I bring in a book for despatch abroad.
‘That ’on’t go today,’ says Mr Watts.
Although this is not all Mr Watts says, it is possibly his most characteristic utterance. Watts is a kindly, crusty man, with teeth of fierce yellow and a tisicking cough, both cough and yellowness caught from the old pipe he constantly smokes. Uncomplainingly, he works all day with paper and string, making the odd excursion to the post office in St Aldate’s, or delivering a package to a college nearby. His movements as he works are leisurely and professional. He never wastes an inch of string.
After about four in the afternoon, when a sort of drowse overcomes the shop in general, as the lack of air gets to us all, and Mrs Y makes a pot of tea for us, Mr Watts views further candidates for posting with an increasingly jaundiced eye and larger clouds of smoke, and utters again his immortal phrase, ‘That ’on’t go today.’
Beyond Mr Watts’ cubbyhole is a door into the rear premises. The shelves here are rather makeshift, stuffed with books in wild disorder, books bought cheap and unloved. They lie now, idle and unemployed, volumes on brass and beadwork and brassica crops and ballet and the breaststroke and Bastien-Lepage and Brittany and Buckingham, to venture no further into the alphabet.
Even this is not the end of everything. There are rickety back stairs, where once the maids of the Salutation Inn carried up trays of porter to gentlemen dining privately in upper rooms. On the stairs, on every step, more books are piled, right up to the top. They are making their way upstairs. There is hope for them. Some will enjoy the privilege of being catalogued by that shy, charming, poetic man you probably meet just here. He is polite, amusing, and already a little bald. He is just the company a new assistant wants, and is recently down from Merton. His name is Roger Lancelyn Green.
Roger is no more. At that time, he had written a delicate fantasy or two, some poems, and a book on Andrew Lang. He was destined to become quite famous and to marry a pleasant Oxford lady. Later would come his involvement with Lewis Carroll. At present we will leave him cataloguing books on the stairs and peering into a first edition of Douglas Jerrold’s Mrs Caudle’s Curtain Lectures, which were at that time still sought after in Oxford.
If we turned left past Roger, we should enter the rare book store behind Mr Sanders’ office. Instead, we turn right where the stair twists, and find ourselves in Heaven.
This is the highest part of the ancient building, highest and untidiest. Its one dusty window looks out across the broken rooftops of Oxford.
In imitation of the real thing, Heaven is damp and leaky. Here, Dickensian charm and creative vandalism go hand-in-hand.
Many are the old books which find their way into Sanders’ clutches. Some are fashion or natural history books. Some are of a topographical nature, illustrated by steel engravings or etchings: views of English countryside, foreign views, views of Oxford colleges. Sometimes the bindings of such volumes may be torn. Sometimes the text may be considered dull. Then the book can be broken up and the illustrations or maps sold separately. And sold especially well when coloured and mounted. This applies with particular force to that beautiful octavo book in three volumes, Ingram’s Memorials of Oxford, many sets of which, entering the premises of Salutation House, find themselves broken up for the sake of the engravings of colleges within. Good complete sets must by now be extremely scarce.
The breaking, the mounting, the colouring, is done in Heaven. Here, at benches under a dusty window, sit Sheila and Miss Worms, working away with their watercolours. Mr Rudolph Ackermann’s Repository of the Arts, which produced many fine illustrated books last century, must have been just such a place as Heaven, housing folk who had fled from the Terror in France after the Revolution. We find an echo of that here in Heaven: the cheerful and teasing Miss Worms is in fact a refugee from Hitler’s Reich. As for Sheila, she is young and pert and pretty, and I once fancied myself in love with her.
So to the stock room behind Sanders’ office. Here are the scarcest books, the most precious, the most cherished. The stock room is subdivided. In a small locked room called Pickle rest those books deemed most scarce, most precious, most cherished, by the miserly Sanders. These regal favourites are drawn up in ranks, gaining in value … We mentioned Mr Ackermann; here stand no fewer than seventeen sets of Ackermann’s History of Oxford, in two volumes, full of lovely coloured plates of colleges. There are even a few sets of Ackermann’s Cambridge. Together with many other books, some mildly pornographic, which Sanders could not bear to sell.
In the stock room you may come across a set of Peacock’s