18 Bookshops

by Anne Scott

  Under The Sign of The Unicorn at No. 7 the sellers published and sold books on graphic art, music, architecture, literature and The Unicorn Press was established in 1902. By 1914 the trade in the Court was chiefly bookselling and the senior, first-begun Bookshop, Watkins’ at No. 21, was advertising a new specialism in London – ‘all areas of the mind, body and spiritual literature’.

  By 11.00am I have had coffee, and Watkins’ Esoteric Bookshop is opening up as it has done here every weekday since 1901. Had I been here then and in the ensuing years, I might have waited with W.B. Yeats, himself a member of The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, who shared with John Watkins a friendship of interests with Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. Searching London in vain for esoteric writings in 1897, she persuaded John Watkins to create a means of selling books on metaphysical and spiritual questions in the Hermetic and Kabbalistic traditions, to take a chance on there being a public in London for mysticism and occultism. He agreed and began his business as John M. Watkins in 1897 at 26 Charing Cross Road simply by issuing a catalogue in his name. In 1901 the year of her death, he opened his shop at 21 Cecil Court.In 1947, his son Geoffrey extended the business to include No.19 next door. The shops have changed their owners since 1984 when Geoffrey himself died, but the name has remained.

  I think of all this as I go in and as I sit for a minute before searching the shelves. The big windows are separated from the shop by curtains in pale tea colours. Towards the back walls is an ordinary staff door made exotic to me by a white fall of linen. A tall Indian philosopher/seer beside me has already found his book. He stretches, resets his turban, and settles to read. Among the shelves are little tables with trays of stones, white, blue, black, magical to the hand. In small wall-cases, silk backed in white, are others, but they are more precious stones, set in silver rings. There are incense sticks lit and to buy, and delicate carved boxes, figures, carved flowers.

  I have come for a book. I am vague about its title.

  ‘It has ‘honour’ in it,’ I tell the young man, ‘and it’s in the Pagan Ethics Series.’

  ‘I’ve seen it! ‘he says. ‘I know I have – let me look –’

  He hurries down a flight of stairs marked ‘More Books’ and then I hear him call up, ‘Got it!’ and he emerges, one hand raised with my book.

  ‘How did you find it so fast?’ I ask him.

  ‘We were trying to classify it earlier. It’s between Philosophy and Esoteric, Greek Classical and Eastern. . .’

  He is about twenty-five, delighted because he has found my book and has a true bookman’s answer for me. He keeps it by him while I go looking at the Food and Nutrition section to buy a paperback history of coffee. There is so much to see: books that document esoteric learning from early centuries to the 21st century: books that teach Oriental and Indian philosophy, psychologies, Hermetic Arts. Every established religion is here, detailed, referenced: and the Folk religions, testaments from the Natural World and Folktales.

  Books open on the tables show plans for future studies in Divination, Earth Awareness, the practices of Yoga: Consciousness, Alternative Medicine, Contemporary Spirituality. There is so much I like but have no way of understanding: the exquisite beads and chains, the glowing crystals, the fine silks, the secret societies’ teachings. Nor do I search to understand them. I need to keep for myself wide spaces of not knowing, to believe that other visions exist, to know that they are there.

  I leave with my two books and go to the other Watkins shop at No. 19. Once a house stood here belonging to Jean Couzin, a barber, who gave lodgings to Leopold and Anna Mozart from April till August 1764, with their child Wolfgang new-arrived in England to give his first concerts in London. I think of him now, aged seven, his gifts as unfathomable as anything I might find in this bookshop. How to divine them, other than as beyond knowing? This is a perfect place to be aware of him.

  For all the many explanations here in the teachings, there are as many books about faith beyond explication, authors debating reality and vision in the conditions of the modern world, spirituality and modern man, in terms that allow for mystery, dissociating reason.

  On February 23rd 2010 Watkins announced the sudden end of trading, the closure of 19 and 21 Cecil Court. Baffled at this loss, I thought of an e-mail conversation I had from the shop in December 2009 about T.S. Eliot’s interest in Gourdjieff’s works. An assistant told me he could find ‘no real oral history of this in the shop,’ but that Eliot did have an interest in the philosophies the shop covers, that his 1948 play The Cocktail Party shows Gurdjieff influence, and that he quotes from The UpanishadsI in The Waste Land and makes reference there to Madame Blavatsky. This is the kind of conversation he and I might have had in the shop, an exchange carrying knowledge lightly and easily, asserting nothing yet informed with possibilities.

  When we learned that the shop was rescued (by its neighbour at No 10) and would re-open, I felt it had been recalled to life. ‘ spirituality of London is not dead,’ said the new owner. Nor are Watkins 19 and 21, nor their name, which remains. The staff has returned and so have the customers, who came to the Re-opening Day on March 13th 2010 in crowds, and brought champagne, Yeats walking with Eliot, Helena Blavatsky with young Mozart, listening.

  14. King’s Bookshop, Callander:

  The Reading Garden

  This is a bookshop with more than one name, spoken of as King’s, as Diehard Publishing and as Poetry Scotland because its owners are booksellers, publishers, and at the same time, sharp and generous critical editors for promising poets.

  The shop is a performance hub, sometimes a refuge. No name is printed over the wide front windows, there being no short way to describe what happens here: but a sign hanging out from the door says ‘BOOKS’ and across one window span, in cursive script, ‘Book Shop’ and ‘It’s Why You Came Here!’ I react spontaneously. How can they know? What’s ‘It’? Where’s ‘Here’? A connection is struck. I go in already part of a conversation.

  And then there may be no one there, or someone is writing at a table and does not look up or speak till I have turned away. I’ve learned the gentle purpose: once a woman hurried in while I was reading, asking as she came, ‘Have you a book on how to make jam?’ and the answer was swift – a quick reach forward into a shelf and a brief word, some explanations, a sense of a problem unravelling, payment and restored quiet. Here is an owner who reads her visitors and leases out time to the ones who need it, who want it in this place. She is Sally Evans.

  It is a long room with more light than comes in at the window and the long-paned door. The shining round table reflects like a camera obscura on three walls of books, islands of travel books, children’s books. A tower of many colours turns into Mairi Hedderwick’s illustrations, Narnia, The Grinch and other Dr Seuss friends, Roald Dahl. . . I move along the fiction wall and find a doorway with sight of a garden on a hill beyond, like an illustration in a Book of Hours. My mind stretches back to Narnia behind me in the window curve. There seems no way for me to go from the bookroom up to the sunlit flowers, but there is: only not yet.

  I ask about a copy of James MacPherson’s Ossian and we search the top shelves of Gaelic poetry in translation, a rare specialist scholarship renowned in this shop. The book we bring down is too fine for me. It has been richly bound in leather, like its neighbours, by Ian King, co-owner of the shop, a master-binder with a studio next door. Now I see what makes those upper shelves glow from beneath like Renaissance textile.

  All I need is a working paperback, a mere text of words, not worthy to be here in this company of editions. I find, though, the book I need about Shakespeare’s London, and a Dublin-set Maeve Binchy good read for a friend: and then an unusual illustrated book named The Bees, written in terza rima mainly for children, by one of the owners. Learning about the facetted work of Sally Evans and Ian King is like passing from one room to another where each is devoted to a gifted task. Both are poets. I sense multiple possibilities in them and they are hospitable to stran
gers in a kind of stern fellowship I have not met before.

  After some visits over a few years, I am asked if I would like to come to the September Weekend where poets read their work in the garden. This is the undiscovered country, the glimpsed place of my first time here. Now I was to go into it, granted entry by poetry like a woman in a fable. The actual experience was more human and splendid. The garden gleamed with orange red flowers in Pre-Raphaelite shadings and tall pale trees, and before we read, we were guests at lunch at a table laid just aside from one of the green paths

  Poets vary. They carry their poems in brief cases, crushed into inside pockets, in folders of sweetest leather, in embroidered bags, in ring binders: and there are degrees of fussing, laying out, searching the pages. I see with love the weary reader unfolding his two A4 papers, the anxious reader clutching at a falling page, the eager and popular poet, clearly successful and known here, smilingly surprised when her turn arrives.

  I think of Robert Henryson writing in pastoral gardens like this one, delighting in human diversity in 15th century Fife, and saddened at its travail: and I remember Robert Kirk who was minister at Aberfoyle not three miles from this poetry garden, writing The Secret Commonwealth of Fauns, Elves, and Fairies in 1658, disappearing from his world in 1692, and never found.

  In the audience some listeners are attentive to the poems, some pull their chairs round, half-away, taking the furthest lie of hedge to sit by. The readings are in English and Gaelic, like the books in the shop. When a poet has read thrillingly there are natural silences. It may be that someone will reach down for his violin or a flute and open out the silence.

  There is always coffee kindly offered and after the Readings everyone is invited to gather in the shop for conversation. We leave the garden. I follow the little passage but miss the door the others have gone through. Where I am has no ‘Private’ or ‘Staff Only’ instruction – that’s not the style of this shop – but there’s a softish haze to the light as if the books on the shelves have not yet come into their lives, or have left them. Most are venerable, but may be waiting to be bound and transformed.

  When I’m back in the bookshop, its long room is a little less bright as the September day lengthens. Readers are exchanging details, even with me, so lately met. A surge of energy comes through the space and I remember the words on the window – ‘It’s Why You Come Here’ and there seems to be an answer now, though none I can share.

  On my first time here, I stood outside to memorise the building from the street. Two houses made up the shop and bindery: sandstone walls, some plants along the pavement, a delicately carved bookshelf of paperbacks. A step rose up to a blue painted door beautifully glazed in bevelled glass, and two Scottish banners, a SSaltire and a Lion, leaned together in the porch.

  Today I see they are flying outside at the windows from high iron brackets. There is something heraldic here then, in the passion the owners have for Scottish poetry, in the way they deploy their lives to have it written, read and known in a Scottish pleasaunce healing to the spirit.

  15. Bauermeister’s Bookshop, Edinburgh:

  Leaving

  My sun poured down with a steady gold. I was eighteen and studying literature at the University of Edinburgh and every day in a wide room at the top of Minto House in Chambers Street I looked up through a window into the sky. It roved into whiteness, empty, not waiting for me to fill it with life, but unmistakeably life itself.

  For the first time, I was listening to poetry spoken like music and reading conversations with Charles Lamb who, I found, had my brother’s style and humour. I leaned into drama, concentrating my Scottish ear on Elizabethan blank verse. I found Christopher Fry, saw The Lady’s Not For Burning and learned Thomas Mendip’s lines by heart. People offered opinions with an upward tilt asking for discussion, not the immediate submission I had been raised on. Very soon I knew what this was on these autumn sunlit mornings. This was happiness, a new thing. The window was all future and the present was perfect.

  Each morning I left my home whose disappointments and fears were the only seriousness, its vitality persistent in doubts and judgements. The Edinburgh train travelled fast into sunlight and my scanned and rhyming coloured world. I was learning to trust enthusiasm and to speak readily about what pleased me. There had been glimpses earlier in talk with my much older brother who read to me from Patrick Campbell and Paul Jennings, pages in P.G. Wodehouse and K.R.G. Browne: who took me to Glasgow to hear John Gielgud as Hamlet, to the School of Art to look at shape in the Mackintosh chairs and panels, to see paintings by Courbet, Rembrandt, Dali, Millet, Turner, Degas in the galleries. He told me that ideas were the work part of thinking, gave me language to make sense of them, and talked me into what imagination was and what it could do. I understood metaphor before I understood love.

  Now in my light-swept new life, I was found by a companion two years older. He sat with me, he took me to meet his friends, gave me a peopled place with himself as a sudden and constant gift. Over four years, he met me off the train each early morning and saw me away on the 5.15 from Waverley at night all northern winter long and into spring. We parted for the long summers. He ordered a suit from a tailor in Rose Street each June to be ready in August in time for the Festival, when he would return from his holiday job in a London bookshop. In this way our separation time was no longer than the time it takes to make a suit.

  In our second year, he took me to a Bookshop, a small enclave opening like a sunflower among the elegant stone at the top of the Mound. In the walled precinct of The Bank of Scotland and The Assembly Hall of The Church of Scotland, its window sang with the colours of its foreign book covers, the zinging yellow of French literature and Victor Gollancz books, the pure white of foreign essays, the scarlet jackets of political black-letter history, the wise blue of European novels, romans et poetiques: and some Irish poets dressed in smooth lettering on dark brown covers under the white lights.

  This was Bauermeister’s on the Mound. The shop and its owners were moving steadily south in Edinburgh, trading earlier in South Frederick Street and later to open on George IV Bridge. They carried few textbooks and no second-hand stock. The wood panelling was old, the wooden floors too, but the shelves shone. I had never before seen books opened out on easels but here were huge art portfolio books, Georgia O’Keefe, Winslow Homer, Pierre Bonnard, Van Gough, Monet, Jack Yeats. The paper itself was almost all I longed for: so perfect, so proportioned, the dimensions, the balance, the line. O desirable new world!

  Though I had no way of knowing, the shop was a revealed landscape in my continuing journey. I crossed a border in its threshold and the world showed me more.

  My friend had come to buy Autumn Journal by Louis MacNeice, a late edition of the 1939 long poem which would build for us the next spell of our time. The shop was close to the Central Library where I studied alone each afternoon, down three flights of white-tiled stairs in the Commercial Room, so quiet because distant from the crowded work-tables of the main reading rooms far above. Every day about four, my companion clicked open the library wicket gate, and I and my books went with him to a café opposite Saint Giles Cathedral in the High Street. Over many days, he read to me there from Autumn Journal, taking Part IV – though I barely understood this then – as his declaration of love to me.

  It had nothing of the sweet sound and flow of my studied poems, my Elizabethans and Victorians but I knew it was truer, to a real girl who was near enough me for her to be me.

  So I give her this month and the next

  Though the whole of my year should be hers who has

  rendered already

  So many of its days intolerable or perplexed

  But so many more so happy:

  Who has left a scent on my life and left my walls

  Dancing over and over with her shadow . . .

  In the old café, up a spiral stair, and seated at a shaky table in the window, I looked into the square below, winter white and darkening, and listened to the wo
rds. The book cover was russet lettered in cream tall capitals. He read with his eyes only on the pages. The poet – the book – spoke but I heard it not as a text but a meditation of the real and present, our life.

  When the clock on the Tron Church chimed five, we had to leave and run together down a hundred steps to Waverley Station for me to catch the 5.15 back to my other world. As our second year became our third, and then our fourth, he ceased to leave me at the ticket gate and came aboard the train, staying on as it left, travelling on his platform ticket till the collector came, and then we paid him. On days of long light, he made the journey back by return. In winter my family set another place at the table till it was time for the last train.

  Our conversations and our recognition had MacNeice’s best of words to hold them and we added to them with ease, increasing ease, and truthfulness always, seeing the grace of ourselves and widening that into knowing the grace of others.

  So that if now alone

  I must pursue this life, it will be not only

  A drag from numbered stone to numbered stone

  But a ladder of angels, river turning tidal

  The magic transcript of those years was the Central Library, time with Bauermeister’s bookshop poetry shelves, the café by Saint Giles.

  Then, though long in that paradise, I sensed a different life ahead when we had to make plans for our future. There were impasses. I had covenanted to repay money to my elderly father and mother with two years’ teaching but now there were the promises to my friend. The jobs we both had in prospect in London, his home, agonisingly waited. We had no skill or gift to settle choices when promises fight each other, obligation with love, reason with longing.