by Anne Scott
I knew nothing of that when I began this book. Confirming the shop address with me, an Edinburgh librarian suggested I write to The Scottish Catholic Archives in Drummond Place, whose Archivist sent me the history of the Grail Movement in Scotland and so gave me a new image of the Bookshop. My personal links with the Grail Legend were to Glastonbury, the Arthurian imagination, seers and quests, writings, books, forms of transfiguration different from the Movement’s healing concepts: but part of a whole.
I see now that The Grail shop’s purpose in Edinburgh was to lead an international dialogue through world literature. It was there I first read the 13th century Afghan poet Rumi, and Martin Luther King’s speeches. I was led back to Christopher Fry’s plays after years away, and started with Wallace Stevens and Emily Dickinson when I met an American volunteer working there.
The identity of The Grail Bookshop is still for me in its simply being there in the heart of Edinburgh, my town. Its second floor was open for meetings. Artists held shows, musicians came, poets read, play readings happened. One Saint Andrew’s Night, Fionn MacColla read fromAnd The Cock Crew his novel on the Scottish Clearances: Duncan MacRae performed. I missed them all, close-bound as I was to the books on the ground floor. With very little money, I bought when I could, and no one minded how long I read.
In the end, the shop closed in 1977, defeated chiefly by rising rents in George Street. I went there in no quest for The Holy Grail but I found something precious all the same. This bookshop gave me more than books. On a Saturday morning when I was sometimes alone, sometimes with my son, the brightness of its music (often Vivaldi), the conversations, paintings and soft quiet spaces to read in – and the way that all these were represented as good, and right – taught me to lose my habitual guilt that I loved them, and I call that a gift to have been given.
10. Books Of Wonder New York City:
The Colour of Hudson Street
Books of Wonder was my neighbour for a time. Each day the tower bell at The Church of Saint Luke in the Fields chimed on the hour, a green-red signal flicked cold and hot lights in a delicate green cage above the traffic, the sun crossed white on the sidewalk. What only I knew was that these were signposts to Wonder for me to follow: but first I had to leave behind the self I came with. I had to wait, turn round, look. What a beautiful place this is! Hudson Street, Greenwich Village, in the morning, summer 1992. Slim trees sidle the walks, one at each black gleaming door, the red brick houses are high-stepping and railed. Black carriages could be arriving for evening balls and cards, Henry James is close. A big yellow NYC crane waves me on and I cross Hudson Street by the shine of a long silvery street lamp mysteriously lit at noon.
The handle on the red door of Books of Wonder was heavy gold. The floor lay boarded like a deck. Books were colouring the air all round, at my feet, above my head, round a ship of high white shelving careening in mid-stream. From inside, Hudson Street had become a glittering forest beyond the long window, where the bookseller was busy with papers. He was the only stranger in the room – everyone else I knew: Jim Hawkins, the Cowardly Lion, Alice, and Dorothy, Peter Pan, Tom Sawyer, Uncle Remus, and The Velveteen Rabbit. Rat, Mole and Badger looked up from opened pages of The Wind in the Willows, on the riverbank forever. High on a beam the Mad Hatter’s banded hat tilted down, brilliant dark and velvet.
It helps to discover this shop when you have arrived at some question in your life. What’s real? is a good one. Or Where’s best to go now? Both were mine. Was it high time now to go over rainbows and through looking glasses? The shelves crowded me with worked and lived-through answers from writers in every culture and time, who sent their imaginations on journeys to search in places of the mind and soul – wayfarers in The Hundred Acre Wood, Narnia, Oz, down the Mississippi, into the clearings of German forests stilled with magic. Scottish writers struggling in personal half darkness had turned over their lives trying for the light of their childhood again – Robert Louis Stevenson, James Barrie, Kenneth Grahame, George MacDonald. They were all here.
On my way to arrive at noon, with St Luke’s bell ringing, I had stopped by McNulty’s Tea and Coffee Company in Christopher Street to sit at a table outside, one of the high ones, and read Lunch Poems by Frank O’Hara who was here in the Fifties and Sixties. He writes that it is ‘Grace to be born and to live as variously as possible’ and I think yes: there with the hot sun out, somebody putting orange flowers in a glass on a table, and a small-paned white-paint window by my side.
And now I was here in Books of Wonder. The room is surely square? Yet space is opening far out and moves like a carousel. I catch sight of Ichabod Crane, Anne of Green Gables, Curdie, Prince Caspian going by, a Mermaid and a Tinder Box, Long John Silver with Oliver Twist and Jiminy Cricket. At my back, in an endless frieze one of The Wild Things out of Sendak is dancing with The Tin Man and a Dragon. The white wooden stair curves by a comfortable corner to settle in – an enclave where a child sits apart, surrounded by open, shut, and waiting books. Dreams and quests have no national borders. Mark Twain is alive in Europe, C.S. Lewis in America, Lewis Carroll in South America. I wish a Mexican boy would tell me how he likes The Cat in the Hat.
On this day in Books of Wonder I wanted to be given an American book, one I had never seen or heard of, a New World book. When I asked him if this could be found for me, the bookman nodded, came down his three steps, ran his fingertips along spines and volumes, then handed me a slim broad-paged hardback in a dark red dust jacket, a beautiful book to hold: The Mysteries of Harris Burdick by Chris Van Allsburg.
‘This could be the one you’re looking for,’ he told me.
What I had bought with my $15.98 is a book made from mysteries, some drawings given to Van Allsburg as a bundle of enigmas, untraceable to an owner and baffling to the eye. Each one is finished in faint chiaroscuro grey and cream brushed to white. On every tall wide page, the images recess into shadow and at the same time resolve into a figure, a ship, two children, a boy by a stream, a bed in an empty room. On each facing page, the author has written a simple line of words, illuminating only in that the drawings seem to speak them.
They come with a deep strangeness, even a kind of humour, like dream encounters more comprehensible than life and almost explaining it. A boy stands against the skyline as a harp emerges from a stream.
So it’s true, he thought. It’s really true.
On the book’s cover, four people are setting out on a journey by bogie-truck. The rail line is single, running along a sandbank on an empty plain. They have raised a sail full spread: far off turrets glimmer on a castle or a palace. One of the boys, half standing, has turned to look at them.
If there was an answer, he’d find it there.
No one closes this book unchanged for it releases dreams. Best of all, its readers want to tell a story too. Places are found, and voyages begun, landfalls made by people amazing themselves.
‘Where did that come from?’ they ask at the story’s end, finding they have come very far from where they began.
Books of Wonder’s own childhood years from 1980 were spent at 444 Hudson Street. Two years on, it moved to No 464. By 1986 a sister shop opened its green doors on the corner of 7th Avenue and 18th Street, and in 1993, one year after I found it, the Hudson Street store closed the red door and all the inhabitants leapt and cavorted off to join the family store a street or two north. I’ve not seen it yet, but I hear that the newest Books of Wonder has grown up into a long wide paradise. In 2010, the owners promise ‘to find you the best for the children you love’. Including you.
They sell first editions (and reprints of them) of Frank Baum’s Oz stories and other early works, rare books bought by people who want to hold a lost copy again, or to read an early gift in the print and on the paper they remember.
A photograph of its doorway shows a shop-sign on a bracket. It looks to be made of dark green silk embroidered with:-
BOOKS OF WONDER
Books for Children Young and Old
It must be made from metal or wood, I know. It’s a chivalric blazon all the same, unfurls like a trumpet fall and opens out in other and further worlds.
11. The Turl Bookshop, Oxford:
If it were lost, then how?
In old guidebooks to Oxford some names are not so much printed as inlaid – the High, Magdalen Bridge, Carfax and Isis, Balliol, Trinity – patterns of gold and blue banded with youth. Collegiate streets go heralded – Holywell, Saint Giles.Beyond them in the everyday town, the buses run on plain serviceable highways named for their destinations too, but differently: Cowley Road, the Iffley Road, the Botley Road.
The Broad and the High were named to guide the earliest travellers searching out their paths by dimension and shape. Between them runs The Turl named for ‘tirl,’ an Anglo-Saxon gait, a strait place, narrow. Once it opened to a pathway from the city to Balliol and Trinity through the defences of the old wall. It is an allegory, a passage to be read in different ways, both a defence and an entry. Till 1363 it was Saint Mildred’s Street and later Sylver Street for the gold and silver smiths who had their work cells there.
This is the street where at Number 3, The Turl Cash Bookshop stood, selling old books, maps and prints and a famously rich hoard of classic modern fiction. I came here first in the 1970s, scurried along by a friend in the last minutes of an Oxford dusk.
Ten years later, I was back, by morning daylight and there it was, this Bookshop, taller than I thought, three storeys and an attic under a steep sloping roof. Five stretching windows of twelve panes each and below them, the shop. A band across its windows carried the name:-
TURL CASH BOOKSHOP – BOOKS AND PRINTS
The two wide shop windows rose high, the left one an open field of maps, a globe, charts, some folded, some stretched like sails: the right many-shelved and packed to the glass with leather-bound works gilt-named and bookmarked with ribbon. Like an afterthought of the glazier, a door opened narrowly down right, up one step, the entry loudly and harmoniously belled. At one time the pavement was too tight and the traffic too close for window gazing, but in 1985 the street closed to traffic and the old cobbled lane became a strolling place. The Turl Bookshop responded with piled up beautiful displays to be seen from across the street like a light-box.
I had been with strangers when I first came and the books held back. Now I began to make the kind of discoveries that come from travelling alone. The owner was an antiquarian by instinct and choice but preserved on a special range of bookcases the best of 1930s to 1960s paperback fiction in the Penguin orange and green liveries. I bought from him a 1954 Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm, Philip Larkin’s novel A Girl In Winter and Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh: C.P. Snow’s Strangers and Brothers too.
The walls of the shop were shelved in dark polished wood at the Turl level, with a small central table and a cash till to the rear. Light filtered through to a stair with a right turn, short and thickly railed. The floor above shone down, the wide windows reflecting sunlight on maps, big white charts, pale blue seas and sanded shallows. The shining play between sky outside and those sea-road maps lit up T. E. Lawrence, Captain Robert Scott, Ernest Shackleton, and deepened the dark, dark blue star sheets of the heavens.
Joseph Parker was the first bookman to open up here in 1823 when there was a coffee house nearby to take your novel to, your new Walter Scott, or the last volume of Keats. With its long hospitality to books and serious readers, the Turl Bookshop was always a serious and varied place. I saw copies of John Fletcher’s plays there in modern reprints, that John Fletcher who was Shakespeare’s friend and the brother-playwright of Francis Beaumont. Beside them, a long shelf carried smooth slim copies of poets: of W. B. Yeats, W. H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, Seamus Heaney. I wanted them all.
MBut my search when I was last in The Turl was for a green Penguin, long wanted and not found. If anywhere, then here. It was a slow day. I sat down on the little stair and looked about. The oak rail ran down by some shelves easing themselves into the wall: and I saw it, not suddenly, but just there by my hand, clear, green and white, black title and author: The Moving Toyshop by Edmund Crispin. My book.
It is a strange one with an odd narrative. Cadogan, a man in need of shelter on the Iffley Road, Oxford after dark, finds a toyshop with an unlocked door. Inside he discovers a crime, is himself struck down, and wakes some distance away. When he and the police return, there is no toyshop. A flourishing fully-stocked grocery is in the space, the sturdy grocer himself serving his customers on an ordinary day. Much later Cadogan finds the toyshop again, but in the Botley Road, on the far side of Oxford.
With his investigating friend Gervase Fen, a Professor of English Literature in Oxford, he solves the wide impossibilities of disappearing reality, in company with Jane Austen’s thoughts, and Edward Lear’s. By the end we see how it all happened, and wish then we could be baffled again and believe in the miracles: as we had done. A person reading this book in a room in Oxford can go out into the very streets of the mystery, where the puzzle is, and walk them. We can map them as plainly as the gleaming charts in The Turl Bookshop’s upstairs room.
The concept of Mutabilitie is no stranger to Oxford and in The Moving Toyshop all is change and uncertainties. The book’s author himself had two names. He was Robert Bruce Montgomery, author and composer, and he was Edmund Crispin, author, who believed in wit, in the interstices of the mind, in the mystery of books. He did his best work when he was all but solitary in Devon between 1945 and 1953. In the mornings he held fast-paced conversations with his characters, challenging them to dialogues. He lived in the mind of Gervase Fen, his intellectual detective, untangling toyshop from grocery, emptiness from death. He took the title of his book from Alexander Pope’s line in The Rape of the Lock about ‘ moving toyshop of their heart’ and made it mean our touching longings for other and stranger homes, and his own need to imagine something better than what is, to turn mutability into a heady hope for otherness and mystery.
Writers have seen Oxford as perpetually a key to mystery: a turl is a gate to open in a wall. Perhaps this gift comes from the martyrdoms – Nicholas Ridley, Thomas Cranmer believing in light against every horrific danger of pain and death. The Colleges eternally promise newness – youth, the river, the punts, the sunlight, doors unlocking: the potency of their courtyards, those gates with vistas beyond. Philip Pullman set ‘His Dark Materials’ here, C.S. Lewis conceived Narnia. In Pullman’s Lyra’s Oxford, Lyra learns how to be free and find a road, how to loosen gates between the ironworks and the canal path. This is the Ox Ford, the crossing place.
The bookseller in The Turl Cash Bookshop put my book into a shiny white paper bag, printed with a medieval black-cut of his shop, his name and his sign: Antiquarian Books, Maps and Prints. I made it into a cover for The Moving Toyshop. It’s still perfect and still on my book, years and years into the future.
Number 3 The Turl now houses a shop called Scriptum. Downstairs are fine papers, kinsmen to books, beautiful European parchments and exquisite handcraftings in leather journals. Above, up that short strong stair, the original bright chart-room is now a Classics Bookshop, and right in this place. Once I believed it was a room where I might find Prospero’s Books, such masterdreams as The Alchemies Observed or A Text of Music To Sail A Ship By and A Possibility of Earth in A Time of Stars. I hoped they might be preserved in this good place.
They cannot be. But their brothers in art are there – masks of ancient and incandescent beauty from Venice, Renaissance voices heard again in The Turl.
12. Thomas Davies’s Bookshop, 8 Russell Street, Covent Garden, London 1763:
The Actor, his Bookshop, Samuel Johnson and James Boswell
He was just fifty when he opened his bookshop at 8 Russell Street, Covent Garden in a new building, with a front selling room and a back parlour for conversations and discussions. Russell Street connected Covent Garden with Drury Lane.
It had been created in 1634 and was named for its ground landlords, the
Russells, Earls of Bedford. By 1720, it was ‘a fine broad street’ and by 1762, when he began, it was busy with custom. The house at No 8 had been erected with two others between 1759 and 1760 to form a terrace. Tom Davies could not afford to buy the freehold. As he told his friend the actor David Garrick, it had been set at £1100, but his long lease held and he would trade as a bookseller and live in this house till he died in 1785. It was simply designed with a basement and four narrow storeys of plain plum-coloured brick. Inside there was bookshop space, and a beautiful balustraded and panelled stair curved upwards to the floors where he and Lucy Davies would live.
We need to trace his eventful journey here. In 1729 he entered Edinburgh University, leaving in 1730. Was he Scots – surely his later friend James Boswell would have told us if he had met a fellow countryman? The strong person who emerges early is mercurial and reckless. He becomes an actor distinguished in his dashing debonair roles for half his lifetime. Then in 1762 he settles into London bookselling forever, and in that work, plays the most dramatic part of his life.
He disappears from Edinburgh in 1730 but by 1736 is in London acting with a company at The Haymarket Theatre. He played Young Wilmot in George Lillo’s play Fatal Curiosity, an audience favourite produced by Henry Fielding, later the writer of ‘Tom Jones,’ a great picaresque work reflecting by chance Davies’s own headlong course into his twenties. His acting was well reviewed at The Haymarket, but we lose him again for a year or two until, as an anonymous friend said, he ‘commenced bookseller,’ his first try at the trade, early in the 1740s.
