18 Bookshops

by Anne Scott

  The long shelves, the high stacks, filled and crowded the shop on the High Street near the Tolbooth until 1797. New works were added as they appeared. Surely in 1786 he subscribed to Burns’s Poems Chiefly in The Scots Dialect in The Kilmarnock Edition, ordering armfuls for his customers, and surely he must have brought in The Edinburgh Edition of the work in 1787. Did he tell every buyer in the shop that it all began there?

  From 1789 he developed a new section of his shop to carry the innovative speculative mathematical stock he had gathered after becoming a subscriber to The Practical Figurer, An Improved System of Arithmetic by William Halbert, who had been in 1761 the number-wizard minister at Fenwick Church outside Kilmarnock. He and Templeton laid out their plans in the same bookshop space where Burns had read Fergusson, and where Benjamin Maul shared his vision of liberating children to themselves in books.

  Halbert’s Arithmetical Journal and the mathematics books on the carrel shelves were bought by Templeton first for schools but then, when they asked for them, he sold them to parents, men and women whose school ‘counts’ had deserted them in the fast industrial world of late 18th century lowland Scotland. It had been John Knox’s 16th century dream that child and adult might learn together, and here, in this space-house of discovery, it was done, like so much else.

  William Templeton died in 1797, some months only after Robert Burns.

  7. Smith’s Bookshop, 1 Antigua Street, Edinburgh:

  The Lighted Stage

  Robert Louis Stevenson was here before me. In 1856 aged five he climbed these three steps for the first time into James Smith’s bookshop at 1I Antigua Street, Edinburgh, and asked, in his child-Scots voice, to see the pictures. They were in the window, Sir. In the window and in his dreams, phantasms of air, cutlassed and pistol-armed. He called them ‘Skeltery’ after Skelt the original artist, supplier of flats, scenes, figures, scripts, and designer of imaginations. Beside them in the window, Louis could see a toy theatre to make out of thick card.

  The place ‘smelt of Bibles’ said Louis, and it was wonderfully dark.

  No 1 Antigua Street had been home to books for many years. It was a fine end-of-the-street building on the eastern verge of the New Town, on the way, as Stevenson remembered with excitement, to the ships at Leith. It stood between the city and the sea with the sound of gulls at the door. In 1837 it was opened for trading by Mr. Gray, a theological and classical bookman sharing the premises with Robert Ogle, Bookseller and Stationer, who then moved uptown to No. 49 South Bridge in 1840. James Smith arrived in 1841.

  He was an entrepreneur with vision and ambition. He opened with books and stationery, perhaps making his start with Robert Ogle’s old stock. By Stevenson’s time, he had extended his window displays to show his new discovery – a toy theatre made of card, to be constructed at home, its stage fitted with bright scenery, offering a ‘forest set,’ a ‘combat,’ and thin metal slides to bring figures on-stage into the action. He also had the plays themselves, Louis says, ‘tumbled one upon another’. He could not know that as he looked amazed at the Skelt theatre in 1856, the magical and still unsurpassable maestro of toy theatres was being born in London: Benjamin Pollock.

  As the east end of the city grew busier, he was inviting in younger, different customers, children out with their parents. His window became a beautiful and colourful place to stop, where nursemaids like Stevenson’s Alison Cunningham could rest a little. He opened out the shop with a circulating library, distributed stamps and soon was employing two young men assistants. When Stevenson was older, coming up to seven, and bringing friends in with him, those two ‘demanded of us if we came with money or with empty hand,’ and treated them ‘like banditti’. This was splendid: the whole elegant shop dissolved into a scene out of Skelt, brave young heroes standing firm against mighty and unjust antagonists. It would all break out again in Treasure Island and Kidnapped, on the deck of sailing ships, on Jacobite hillsides, inside evil derelictions in Edinburgh.

  I first came to 1 Antigua Street as a student, wanting to stand in the shop and find Stevenson’s books on sale. The steps were there, the doorway and the windows, though it had become a busy shop of another kind, stocked with newspapers and tobacco. It was easy to see where the books would have been along the shelved walls, and how the window could be set up for the theatre to catch the gaslight from the street lamp. The floor was just wide enough to be the stage where James Smith himself, perplexed into high words by Louis’ slow quandariness, threw up his hands and shouted, ‘I do not believe, child, that you are an intending purchaser at all!’

  A century too late, I found no one there to tell me about the earlier books or their owners. The Scottish Book Trade Index has no record of James Smith here after 1879. In that same year Stevenson left for America. On August 7th he sailed from Greenock on The Devonia to join Frances Osbourne whom he loved, in California. Five years later in a memoir A Penny Plain and Tuppence Coloured, he wrote all that we know of his transforming adventures here in the shop in Antigua Street.

  Something about his leaving Edinburgh in the very year James Smith closed his shop affects me. Smith would never know how mysteriously he had sifted and worked the threads of Stevenson’s adult imagination. The magic effects of the Skelt plays and their theatre surrounded others too. For my seventh birthday I had them from my brother – the theatre was a Pollock one – who so irradiated them with the story of Stevenson in Edinburgh that this unknown city settled in me as a magic source beyond thinking. Later, the shop itself and the plays came to be a point of departure for me, a metaphor I could use for myself, one that brings together endings and beginnings, opened and dropped curtains, acts, scenes, and denouements.

  By 1960, Edinburgh was my home with husband and son. Like Louis’ mother, Margaret Stevenson, I watched with a small boy as the trains puffed out into Princes Street Gardens, and saw him to school in the city. We bought books in George Street as they did and read them in the Old Town, a wonder-place spired and furled like the black etched drawings in our stories.

  Edinburgh ceased to be my home in 1971, as it ended for Stevenson in 1879. It has seemed like exile to me, as to him, not to be there: as if another self is still there waiting out the time till the action resumes and the bright figures hurry on to the stage and into the story again. In the South Seas, Louis could hear the cries of birds circling the moorlands to the west of Edinburgh, over Hermiston. What I hear is the screech-slide of the top-gallant trams curving down the Mound and the fall of footsteps round Greyfriars on an early Sunday morning.

  I went to Antigua Street once more, on an evening in 1984, the last day of a Stevenson conference at Salisbury Green. His biographer J.C. Furnas had closed the celebration with an envoi, his slow American voice addressing Louis who was clearly his longtime friend, just one not around to give us some updated words on that childhood, the journeys, the exile: and always, always the drifting dream of Edinburgh. Afterwards, away from the buzz and talking, No.1 Antigua Street in the late sunshine stood back from me, as strange as a stage set. The corner stone was blacker now, more worn, the windows had blinds drawn for the next day’s Sunday. But the gulls were there, and the long shining pavement running down to Leith.

  The Skelt theatre sets transfigured Louis’ world from static to what he named his Transpontus. He makes no explanation of his word, knowing quite well that if his reader understands, a gift of energies is exchanged. Such a transfiguration paints in a bridge between self and self, across time, and exile, and paradox. If it needs a source, a small black stone bookshop on a gull-blown corner, with a lighted stage in its window, is hopeful enough.

  8. Atholl Browse Bookshop, Blair Atholl:

  Stopping Place

  This is the only bookshop I think of as a picture in a frame. I have tried approaching it in my mind from the north but always it resolves into a quiet composition of shop, hills, road and trees seen from the south. How strange that should happen, because the Atholl Browse Bookshop was set in a lively place.
Behind it fast trains from Edinburgh to Inverness drew in to a porter’s cry of B-L-A-I-R Atholl! Its stone building had lived an earlier life as a petrol station by the roadside so that for decades, everything had swung in, stopped by, set off again. It was busy with transience. In 1988, it stilled into a bookshop.

  The petrol pumps disappeared but someone thought to cover their trace with tall pots planted with flowers: and perhaps this swift transformation inspired the idea of green and white striped canopy blinds over the windows and the magical wooden book boxes (painted bright red) outside. This far north, place names petrify into winter sounds, Calvine, Dalwhinnie, the Lecht. Yet here at their edge was a sudden image of summer offering books and rest, with all pace slackened to a page’s turn.

  The new owners recorded how their first stock was gathered: a local minister arrived with boxes of Penguins, there were auction-room catches of books about fishing, eight boxes of fine Scottish books from a villager, countless works bought from a bookseller discharging his stock, and many ex-library volumes. They studied the locality. In a village quiet between autumn and spring, people would look for books on needlework, railways, summer fishing, recipes, fiction and the popular detective Penguins, the green ones.

  I found this bookshop in the summer of 1991 on a journey to Findhorn to stay in the Community. Nervous and unable to picture the next week of my life there, I followed a diversion as distraction. Blair Atholl unfolded as a grey village with Blair Castle at the centre, a shining white long house in a green park with open gates. By the railway station a hotel more castellated than the Castle formed out like the opening shot of a film, its steps and great Victorian entrance chattery with summer visitors. And beyond, by itself, the Atholl Browse Bookshop. I pulled over.

  The welcome inside was as good, as bright and unusual, as the French brilliance of its outside. A man greeted me at once and brought me coffee and we sat down by the window at a wide table covered in red cloth. The narrow aisles ended in boxes of books, the shelves were full, smartly new, and labelled. There were no steps, no disappearing stair, no big desk. Just books, all round, to search.

  Almost at once I found The Findlater Sisters: Friendship and Literature by Eileen Mackenzie, the best study of two early 20th century Scots novelists, Jane and Mary, urbane and witty women: and next to it Crossriggs, their best novel, published in 1908. Here is a modern woman character, Alex Hope, caught in a rural village (but always with trains to Edinburgh and Glasgow as escape). There are stretching choices, and none, until, with a deconstruction of her life, she finds a new way to take. Something in this book, Alex Hope herself perhaps, makes it a book for now – new bright-covered editions have appeared in 2009 and 2010. It’s the book Jane Austen might have composed if left without family in Edwardian Perthshire.

  When I paid at his table, the man asked me about my journey on. ‘And how do I get back to the main road?’ I had to ask, Findhorn now in my head. ‘You don’t have to go back,’ he told me. ‘This road here will take you round.’

  Outside I joined some customers looking at big bright paperbacks in the red-painted boxes. We were like the bees that were clamouring in his flowers.

  In the next years, I returned three, four times. The stock was never predictable and never static. It came in from collectors who had eclectic minds (or large families, all readers) and Atholl Browse brought me A Bullet in the Ballet by Caryl Brahms and S.J. Simon, a rare collaboration of ballet critic and contract bridge genius, and their No Bed For Bacon, an inspirational ghost, perhaps, for the film Shakespeare in Love. I found The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Matsuo Basho, the 13th century visionary who surely became Robert Louis Stevenson in a later incarnation, writing and sleeping out under the pines, caught up again in their mysteries.

  This was where I began to gather American Indian poetry with Red Clay, Linda Hogan’s Chickasaw poems about her mother who veered between the gentle body-care she gave and the bitter words she spoke. Later there was Talking Indian, Anna Lee Walters’ reflections on survival and writing, and her search for 14th Century Pawnee Indian forebears, first on the Great Plains and then – where she found them – in 19th century reservations in Nebraska and Kansas.

  Like a glittering playbill A Hard Day’s Night lay on top of another book and I bought it to see how the Beatles made their film, and then the one it lay on: an Everyman paperback John Donne with a beautiful Doubleday New York bookmark among his early lyrics..

  The shop passed to new owners in 2003. I’ve been back in my search for Letters from Gourgonel by Kenneth White. This trail bends me into the last alphabetical reaches of bookshop shelves, always at floor level and hard to read – W. B. Yeats takes me even further along. White is seldom there but where he would be, there is Walt Whitman, and so on Thursday 30th March 2006, my last visit, I bought the 1947 edition of Leaves of Grass, the Everyman 1961 reprint in dark teal cloth, for £3. The bookseller drew attention to some ‘slight foxing on exposed edges’ and I thought how his words evoked the wild forests assembled so near his books.

  In spite of its twenty-year life, Atholl Browse always had for me a Scott Fitzgerald spirit of beautiful impermanence as if it would pack up and go overnight, overday, overmorning. It was too fragile, I thought, not grey enough, its clothes too much for summer, its bright face too young for survival. I was wrong.

  Now in 2011, it is filled with beautiful art and design, and with flowers, and I think that may always have been its dream. The books, I hear, were moved to a bookshop in Pitlochry, near the railway station where they could still hear the trains.

  9. The Grail Bookshop, Edinburgh:

  No wealth but Life

  George Street. This wide straight 18th century boulevard runs between the vista stop of St Andrew’s Square and The Royal Bank of Scotland to the east and Charlotte Square to the west, stone-perfect white and grey.

  Mid-way along the street in the 1970s on its north side, a musical bookshop traded with scores rolled open in its windows, little cream busts of Mozart and Mendelssohn on tables, strung bows, a chest of woodwinds, a tasselled red programme. Posters for Usher Hall concerts – gleaming white curling sheets designed with Aeolian harps and old typefaces – decorated the door and hung languorously over gilded easels in the entrance.

  Not far away, the most prosperous saleroom in the city took up a long and more anonymous frontage. These pavements were not now the walking place of David Hume and Adam Smith, but they were true to what 20th century Edinburgh enjoyed: church-going, second hand buying, money saving, and a just proportion of the arts. On many days a scouring wind whitened the stone and shook the green blind over Brown’s bookshop, a wide emporium with a tearoom upstairs and a view of the southern face of the street and the generous arching elegance of The Assembly Rooms.

  These were a perfect Georgian ideal from 1787 of balanced shape and solid foundation. Walter Scott dined there, Charles Dickens and William Thackeray stood at lecterns and read their new books to crowded salons. Levees swept through the double doors to dance in the great mirrored ballroom, figures curving and meeting for ever. Stylishly and with great good humour, the actor Alastair Sim danced with me there when I was eighteen, asking me what kind of University Rector I thought he’d make now that he’d been elected.

  A few doors away, under a white and cream striped awning, a shop gleamed where my engagement ring was bought on a hot day in a later August, in a spell of time when The Assembly Rooms became The Edinburgh Festival Club, and I was there on the evening of that day, life running ahead in an epiphany of gold and brilliance. In the cloakroom, an elderly nun asked to see my ring and wished for me that my nets would be set in pleasant places. George Street was transfigured: even the plainstanes sang.

  By the early 1970s when I discovered the Grail Bookshop at Number 26 nearby, I was beginning to need a perspective on all that living. It’s hard to recall how I heard about it. The doorway hugged into a recessed little railed stair, five steps rising to a door of ideal proportions with a fanligh
t, 18th century wood and glass. A sheltering place.

  What I heard and saw that first time was what I returned to again and again. The house it had earlier been had left its shape in a hallway, curving stair, and a room to the right where the books were. This was a New Town room of human scale. I had begun my Edinburgh life in a flat in Drummond Place, the middle floor of another New Town house built for balls and brilliant evenings, love and youth, the double doors to each room so ready to be thrown open on to candle-blaze and fiddle song that we could not go out to the kitchen without expecting to surprise a game of backgammon in an alcove.The Grail was different, a narrow house, intimate in scale, and it made the finest image of grace with intelligence that I had ever seen.

  The books curved round in shelves against papered walls – pale red – and in short double-sided piers out into the room. This allowed for soft benches and single seats to be set within them for reading. The tall poetry shelves lay to the end of the space under a lamp. That was my best place, when I could have it, to read titles, to read poets. I bought Norman MacCaig’s Selected Poems and read Ian Crichton Smith’s writing for the first time: Philip Larkin and, just in, Seamus Heaney.

  The Grail was a Bookshop within a context, the Grail Movement in Scotland, where the shamanic Mysteries of The Grail were transformed, with money, kindness and insight, into the miracle of changing lives that had given up hope. Between 1933 and the mid 1970s in centres opened by the Movement and through churches internationally, its members ran teaching groups, hostels, and the Ogilvy Training College at Polmont began in 1947. They became nationally known, and after the Second World War, increasingly international in reach. By 1962, they were ready to open The Grail Bookshop as an ecumenical place of new learning, interdenominational, aesthetic.