18 Bookshops

by Anne Scott

  Did they name the colours to each other in Gaelic? What is the Gaelic for gamboge, rose madder, lapis lazuli? Words more musical even than those.

  The Press made prayer sheets: there were so many prayers on the island, soft sounds printed. Sailors’ prayers for the beginning of a voyage, children’s prayers for the start of the day. Each year the type was reset to make a flurry of guidebooks for summer, for sails, for walks to take, wild flowers to find. Over five, six years of island time, the Press sped its sheets in a noise of writing: small unclear pictures, news, happy days out described for strangers. Then it ended as the men who dreamed its beginning parted and went into other work.

  Not far away, in the Heritage Centre, the curator shows me sepia picture-postcards from the original Press, each one lifted out from a soft covering. These are revenants, bought, written, sent, and now returned home. They show brown days on Iona, mahogany land, pale grained sky, silken sails.

  I take postcard number 484/6 into my hand. It is ‘On the Coast of Iona’ and is not of our world, but stilled, a shadow ship standing off-shore. The writer tells me it is Midsummer Day 1912 and that she has been to the silversmith’s shop to buy a present –

  The Keeper allowed you to take it and send the money on.

  Along the road at the landing place, children were selling green marble pebbles.

  The pebbles were roundels of marble quarried from a shoulder of pale green stone above the shore where Columba’s vessel came in: the children polished them in the sea. Picture postcards have become as brilliant as acrylic art, but the summer guides to Iona still hold the vision of Muir and McCormick. They are filled with information and decorated with a small oval photograph of the landing place. The past island pauses for a moment in the photos and cards in its old shop.

  The books on the inner room shelves are muted in brown, dark red, and green covers and I search for something to read in my room. John Galsworthy is there, John Buchan, Thomas Hardy, Aldous Huxley, Osbert and Edith Sitwell. Sea-maps of soundings lie on the table, depths darkening blue. Rich-bound botanical books are opened at sweeping coloured plates, their filmy coverings rising in the draught.

  I find MaThew Arnold’s poems, and Robert Browning’s, Walter de la Mare, Hugh Walpole’s novels: travel books on the desert lands, reference works about the geology of the island, all with fine tweedy-coloured layer drawings. The paper of these books is 19thcentury, early 20th, heavy and lasting. I like, though, the slim volumes of wartime poets, printed on bible-thin paper in the Forties and bound in pale grey cloth with dark red lettering, and the one-act plays for short holiday concentration. Longer volumes in the outer room are memoirs, some military, many Scottish, stories of great heroism, of Scotland, of religious lives. Here are colourful dust jackets showing their authors backed by troop ships, maps, cathedrals, tents and pyramids.

  There is so much stillness.

  The bookseller at her table speaks little and that in a murmur. This seems right. With the Press gone all these years, and the books finely bound on their wooden shelves, what source of sound? Outside is wild enough: a wind coming off the white water streams low through the village. In here there is time, and time, and time again. Someone is writing a postcard. How little writing has changed its shape or what it says.

  If there is often no book for me, something else must keep me here and bring me back. It is not the memory the building keeps of the Press it held. It is whatever has been brought to the space by the men who sheltered in this bothy, and by the tired hands that painted in the Celtic mysteries. I return to hear whatever dreams the emigrants left, the families I see in the dark photographs taken at the leaving, and I want to catch a sound of children and sailors singing prayers.

  The floor at my feet is hard and may be one with the walls and roof and there is an encirclement of minds too. William Blake is here and the postcard writer from Midsummer Day 1912, with Saint Columba, and the scribes. The books in their upright rows are an imitation of life beautifully shelved in order, an alphabet enclosure of choices, and life made readable: but they have no charge equal to meet this space and the brilliant light in the narrow door.

  5. Leakey’s Bookshop, Inverness:

  Little Gidding

  Leakey’s dazzles in a vast democratic space, light everywhere. Like everyone entering here for the first time I knew one fact – that its building by the river had been St Mary’s Gaelic Church. How right this feels, for the Celtic Church is musical with words and the sound of voices carried away by them, and John Knox’s white painted Reformed kirks were founded hard on differently heard words: on sermons articulated under headings in long, thought-through, exactly-punctuated sentences. Where better for books to assemble than here?

  My first sight of the shop’s interior made me think of a drawing I like, of Saint Paul’s Yard in London in 1600 where an outdoor sermon is in progress. The high pulpit there is in this bookshop too, the banked up tiers of people in 1600 are here the books, row upon standing row, upward, tilting to each other like listeners.

  To see all this is to remember the human link between churches and books. A bible was set out in every school and parish in Scotland after the Reformation. In part its purpose was to teach religious concepts but, far more thrillingly, it would teach reading to men and women and open for them all the worlds it leads to. In 1600 London, the churches and the new Globe playhouse sounded with intense rhythms, absorbing voices, spell-binding ideas. In this Northern place, they sang and read.

  It’s very quiet in the shop: or, more truthfully, it’s very quiet up high in the shop. On the first floor and above there is a receding silence contained by the rafter roof, the arched windows: by the fine gold of the shining wood along the walls and by the gallery rail, and most of all by the poetry volumes on the shelves that run out into perspective. I see them up there and keep them for last. There is so much at hand to be seen, to be with, here on the ground floor.

  Under the pulpit topped with books, there is a rectangular space walled with panels and opened by a little railed gate. Addressed packages are stacked on the floor. This is where a studious quiet bookseller is working, where we pay and where we ask for help. Payment is quick, efficient, not a scruple more than essential. Asking is different. The response comes after a pause and the words begin with ‘we’ in this shop. ‘We have a copy – let me just show you where.’ He points to the towers and lanes on our left and gives me an exact address. The book is there and in a minute is in my hand, an English-into-Gaelic dictionary.

  The huge room is warm, wood-scented from a black stove standing in mid-floor, realised out of a folktale, in a forest of logs piled high on each side. Some of their brother woods will have gone to become books, or the paper that made the books. Further down the long floor, the black bellows of a spiral stair is climbing on bats’ wing treads, iron like the stove. They lead to the pale gold gallery where I’m going, to the poetry shelves, the maps and the prints.

  The Gaelic congregations who filled this high building before the books came sang in a language bearing twenty eight separate words for ‘poem’. In such a place I may find any poem, and from anywhere: from other lives too, since this is also a second-hand bookshop. There may be an early W.B.Yeats book first read in Dublin, one of the narrow perfect fine-paper volumes made by his sisters’ Cuala Press, and I’m always looking for an 1855 New York copy of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.

  But high up on this shining bridge where I’ve never been before, I’m ready to believe I could find the dream unattainable – Shakespeare’s Sonnets in the 1609 edition or the 1623 Folio of his plays, Wordsworth’s first edition posthumous of The Prelude from 1850, and the 1633 John Donne. If anywhere, here, in the golden colour of this Klimt fall of books and light.

  When I find it, the book I want is rare and plain. T.S. Eliot’s Little Gidding finished and published in 1942, a war edition in cream card wraps with black lettered title. There are sixteen top-cut pages raw to the leading and lower edges, made from
paper so dense and uneven it handles like early manuscript. The book is tall: octavo, nine inches by seven, slim and chaste. It is the last poem in the Four Quartets sequence, following Burnt Norton, East Coker, The Dry Salvages, and is the culmination of his work.

  The first owner has signed himself on the opening page:-

  Charles R. Redwood, Richmond, July 1943 and then

  Kneller SchoolJune 25th 1943.

  More than three hundred years before, in 1626, Nicholas Ferrar, newly created an Anglican Dean, left London with three generations of his family to establish a sanctuary Community in the small village of Little Gidding not far from Cambridge, with his brother John. He died there in 1637. Seventeen year-old Nicholas, John’s son, succeeded with his father but died in 1640 just as the English Civil War was beginning. In the chaos months after Oliver Cromwell’s final victory, John Ferrar gave sanctuary to the King, Charles I, on his desperate ride north from Oxford to Scotland in May 1646, ‘leading him over fields’ in the dark.

  The Community faded after 1657 when John Ferrar died: his great grandson restored the Church in 1714. In the two centuries before Eliot came in 1936 and 1942, it was a place of pilgrimage, and it is now. The Church and a small community house are there still to visit and stay in, alive in their history and in the poem I had found. There are celebrations of T.S. Eliot each November, readings of his work, and music.

  Which of those twenty-eight Gaelic words for ‘poem’ is best for Little Gidding? ‘Dreacht’ it might be – a pattern, its woven lines involving together London in the 1666 Great Fire and in its bombed blazing streets in 1940, both carrying ‘ death of hope, and despair’ when the citizens watched their lives disappear. Or possibly ‘amhra’, being poem, dream and sword-hilt – words swirling and circling into a living design, carved images dissolving into shapes and visions, roses and flames infolded.

  In the earlier Quartets, air, earth, and water – the elements of life – are celebrated, as they might have been here in this Inverness Church at Communion. But Little Gidding encompasses the element of fire, destructive but as well purifying a space and making a new place.

  Best of all, Little Gidding is ‘uige’, ancient Gaelic in its believing that a poem is a precious stone, a deep-reflective jewel-place touched and renewed and shining, Eliot ending on the healing promise that:-

  The end of all our exploring

  Will be to arrive where we started

  And know the place for the first time.

  Sometimes, as here, a Bookshop may be defined forever in a life by a single found book.

  6. William Templeton’s Bookshop, Irvine 1782:

  The Crossing Place

  In 1782 William Templeton’s bookshop in Irvine occupied narrow premises in the High Street near the Tolbooth. This was a key area for local business and for passing trade, with strangers coming in by coach from Glasgow to the staging post across the road in the Glasgow Vennel.

  By those same coaches Templeton imported books from the city and sent on parcels of new titles to merchants trading books to commissioning customers in Glasgow, Stirling, Edinburgh and Inverness. His connection with Ireland had been especially strong, a consistent and money-making trade in cheap reprints of Dr Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary and copies of his Lives of the English Poets from Dublin to the port of Irvine, but the heavy import tax brought a decline in the 1770s. By 1780 the Irish trade had gone underground, briskly successful as a smuggling line running from Dublin to Irvine and then north through Scotland. No tax or duty was paid, the books were illegal commerce but they sold widely: profit grew with demand. And besides, there was an edgy excitement to it for a North British bookman.

  It had to stop. In 1781 the Custom Commissioners in Scotland, chaired on occasion by Adam Smith, set ‘pursuers’ to catch the captains of Irish boats with their cargoes at Irvine harbour. Riskily nearer to William Templeton, they searched and detained carriers at the Glasgow Vennel Weigh House across the road from his shop in full sight of his window.

  No cadre of shipmasters was bringing in anti-clerical or seditious political inflammables. Their most carried author was always Samuel Johnson. Those copies ofThe Lives of The English Poets, a massive work commissioned in Tom Davies’s bookshop in Covent Garden in 1779, were uncovered in a haul intercepted at Glasgow in 1781, the year of the final volume. Hot on their appearance in London, the splendid bound volumes had made landfall in boxed and girded quantity, already reprinted.

  In January 1782, John Watt and James Stevenson, carriers in Irvine, had their carts unexpectedly stopped by Excise Agents in Glasgow. They were packed with new reprints, all illegal, all from Dublin: four copies each of Robertson’s A History of Scotlandin two volumes, A History of Charles V in three volumes, and A History of America in two. Under these, the Dublin printer had packed twenty-five contraband copies of Paton’s Navigation, four prints of A History of Modern Europe and ten copies of The Dictionary of The English Language compiled by Samuel Johnson in 1755 and never out of print.

  What a manifest of innocent titles, blameless education: just expensive and highly taxed.

  They were internally addressed to William Templeton, Irvine, not intended for the counter of his shop, but for its cellar, a notable safe house on the careful quiet journey of smuggled books in Scotland. The bale holding these New Year’s underground Dublin editions, seized in its canvas at Glasgow, was en route eventually for Robert Morrison and Sons, Perth.

  Meantime, in the ‘S’ section of his Dictionaries travelling without passport deep inside the boxes, lay Johnson’s last word on it all.

  Smuggler: A Wretch who in defiance of justice and the laws imports goods contrabandor without payment of customs.

  Templeton was fined in 1782, no worse, and his shop quickly opened again for daily custom, sales, and conversation.

  What did he think, then, when later that same year, the 23 year-old flax dresser Robert Burns crossed the High Street from the heckling shop in the Vennel and asked permission to look at the books on the shelves? Who did he see in the doorway and what did they say to each other – the recent smuggler-bookman, now town councillor, – and Burns, out for an hour from work in search of new minds? He was asking Templeton to let him look at prose, for rhyme, he said, except for some religious pieces, he had quite given up – though, he added, there were always ballads and songs to find . . .

  It was a good time to discover the shop. Templeton had just begun to fill his walls with an ambitious sweep of new leisure books, a bold and modern enterprise he would develop for the next fifteen years. He lent Burns Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, volumes one and three only, leaving him to fill in the plot of volume two which had disappeared. Did Templeton speak about the poets Burns had read in John Murdoch’s schoolroom in Ayr? It’s likely, for Burns admired them then, William Shenstone, Mark Akenside, Alexander Pope.

  At some moment over those few weeks Templeton showed him into the corner where he kept issues of Ruddiman’s Weekly and Burns found, for the first life-altering time, some published poems by Robert Fergusson, dead these eight years.

  Why did Templeton lead him towards poetry? Had Burns confided some of his own work to him? Did he see here a young Scots workman ready to become a poet, and one as heady and driven as Fergusson himself? As passionate to write in his own language?

  And did he have on a ready shelf the Thomas Walker Romantic Poetry volume of 1770 – or even the copy of Fergusson’s Complete Poems which he had ordered for his customer Benjamin Maul? Did he put that into Burns’s hand too?

  Was there a chair? Eighteenth century seaport town bookshop, ambitious owner, booklover – there would be a chair for Burns: and in this way the shop became arevelationary place in the quick of creation. Here Burns turned away from the English formalists and read poetry transcendent in the Scottish tongue and in the speeding rhythms of his own speech. He had come looking for ‘ballads and songs,’ he told Dr John Moore in a letter on 4th August 1787, and he had ‘found Fergusson’.

&nb
sp; Having by this time quit the smuggling trade, Templeton had released himself from the risky company of brother booksellers still involved. He was now an active councillor for Irvine and by 1785 a shareholder in local coal mines. When he met Burns in 1782, he had just begun a long and unprecedented programme to supply local academies with unusual books: books with a difference. He and his bookshop quickened into the hub of an enterprise bringing imaginative literature into young lives. Children would not merely learn to read but to read with critical minds, following the brilliant vision of Benjamin Maul, schoolmaster in the town. Breaking sharply and angrily with the old concepts of books as manuals, Maul was opening out literature as an endless resource for living, not moralistic, not judgemental. Books were for creating a new self for the reader to be.

  Templeton made his shop the source of these new ideas. He and Maul met in his back room to write their booklists for ordering. There had to be Penny-books for the youngest – small picture books ‘for wonder and observation‘. He bought in copies of Three Hundred Animals by Thomas Boreman printed for Richard Ware in 1730, ‘a description of Beastes, Birds, Fishes with a particular account of the Whale Fishery, extracted out of the Best Authors especially to lure Children to Read’. He had some psalm books – but song books too – for singing together. Watt’s Catechism was there and John Bunyan’s A Pilgrim’s Progress for the style, but also to give children images of paths, wayfaring, destinations in their lives, poetic journeying and arrival. He bought in a set of books to encourage handwriting not only for future employers to judge by, but first to give each child a personal signature.

  Templeton lined up dramatic works too on the shelves – Tragedys and Playbooks for classes to perform: Oliver Goldsmith’s essays, novels by Tobias Smollett and Henry Fielding. Thomas Pennant’s Tours of Scotland, Anson’s Voyages, Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver’s Travels, he set out bright in the windows. He ordered in a cautious four copies of William Wallace in the Hamilton of Gilbertfield version from 1772, and sets of Scottish poets – James Thomson, Robert Fergusson and with music, Allan Ramsay’s The Gentle Shepherd.