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Remembering Mr Simmonds

Louis Simmonds was not a tall man. Although I was still at school when I was first introduced to him by my father (and, like my father, I have never achieved more than medium height), my recollection is that he seemed to be looking up, with a slightly surprised expression. Perhaps he was wondering if, like my father, I would be a regular buyer of books in his shop on Fleet Street. Perhaps he was just wondering at the many and varied types to be found on Fleet Street back in the 1960s.

His bookshop – now long gone, of course – was at Number 16. It was a wonderful place despite the fact that, or perhaps because, it was completely unsuited to being a bookshop; or a shop of any description for that matter. It was configured like a two-storey railway carriage. From the outside the building looked impossibly narrow; too narrow to be a building at all really. You entered through a recessed door off Fleet Street, just by the entrance to the Temple down Inner Temple Lane, and turned sharp right into the narrowest of spaces. In front of you was a sort of tunnel, and to your right and left were books. I suppose they were in fact displayed for sale, but the impression was simply of books lined up on shelves, rather than of any attempt at selling. There was only ever one copy of each book – no titles piled high in expectation. You either asked for what you wanted, or you looked through the shelves rather as you might in a library until you found something you wanted. And my recollection is that you always did.

Downstairs – and I discovered the downstairs on that first visit when I was looking for some moderately obscure school textbooks – Mr Simmonds had his stockroom. That is not to say it was where he kept the recently delivered books. They were kept on the ground floor, in the cubby hole that served as an office, and spilled out in everybody’s way. What he had in the basement were essential books that a serious bookseller had to have in stock just in

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Louis Simmonds was not a tall man. Although I was still at school when I was first introduced to him by my father (and, like my father, I have never achieved more than medium height), my recollection is that he seemed to be looking up, with a slightly surprised expression. Perhaps he was wondering if, like my father, I would be a regular buyer of books in his shop on Fleet Street. Perhaps he was just wondering at the many and varied types to be found on Fleet Street back in the 1960s.

His bookshop – now long gone, of course – was at Number 16. It was a wonderful place despite the fact that, or perhaps because, it was completely unsuited to being a bookshop; or a shop of any description for that matter. It was configured like a two-storey railway carriage. From the outside the building looked impossibly narrow; too narrow to be a building at all really. You entered through a recessed door off Fleet Street, just by the entrance to the Temple down Inner Temple Lane, and turned sharp right into the narrowest of spaces. In front of you was a sort of tunnel, and to your right and left were books. I suppose they were in fact displayed for sale, but the impression was simply of books lined up on shelves, rather than of any attempt at selling. There was only ever one copy of each book – no titles piled high in expectation. You either asked for what you wanted, or you looked through the shelves rather as you might in a library until you found something you wanted. And my recollection is that you always did. Downstairs – and I discovered the downstairs on that first visit when I was looking for some moderately obscure school textbooks – Mr Simmonds had his stockroom. That is not to say it was where he kept the recently delivered books. They were kept on the ground floor, in the cubby hole that served as an office, and spilled out in everybody’s way. What he had in the basement were essential books that a serious bookseller had to have in stock just in case he was asked for them. He wasn’t significantly challenged on that first visit of mine: I can’t now remember what I was after, but my recollection is that he dug the books out with a moderate amount of grumbling about there being so little demand for them, he didn’t really know why he still stocked them. I don’t think Mr Simmonds would have put up with customers coming and reading his books for hours on end before deciding whether or not to buy. There wasn’t room for that sort of thing even if anyone had in those days thought that it was appropriate behaviour. And he certainly never provided coffee or muffins for his customers. But it was a bookshop with atmosphere and attitude, and I loved it. I was never greeted as a friend, as my father was – but I took that as being more to do with my age than anything else, and I suppose that, in truth, I didn’t go in as often as my father did. And I never asked myself why the name on the shopfront was ‘L. Simmonds Bookseller’ when I’d been told that Mr Simmonds’s first name was Israel. I never knew anything about Mr Simmonds – other than that his English, although close to perfect, was clearly not his mother tongue, and that he had a wonderful bookshop. I remember my father telling me with delight of the time in October 1969 when he went there to buy Vladimir Nabokov’s latest novel, Ada. It wasn’t on display and so he asked Mr Simmonds if he had a copy, possibly with a discernible trace of pleasure at asking for such a fashionable title in his favourite bookshop. The reply, which my father always believed was delivered in all seriousness, was: ‘What do you want to buy that filth for?’ But of course, even if Mr Simmonds did mean it, he nevertheless had a copy to sell to someone who, inexplicably, wanted to buy it. I have the book still. I never remember outraging Mr Simmonds with a request for a book, but I do have a recollection that gives me almost as much pleasure. As time went on, Mr Simmonds was in his shop less and it was run by a manager and an assistant. It was the manager I spoke to when, in 1980, I was trying to find a copy of a book of which I had forgotten both the title and the author’s name. This vital information seemed to desert me just as I was asking if they had a copy. I was reduced to saying that it was written by a woman, had been published very recently and was, by all accounts, an excellent book. I must have seemed idiotic. This long-suffering man then engaged in what for him must have been a fairly routine cross-examination, eventually establishing that I had recently read a review of the book in the Guardian: the two of us then crowded into the office cubby hole where he produced a number of recent book review pages clipped from the Guardian. We quickly found the right one: the book was identified as An UnAmerican Lady by Jane Foster, and of course they had a copy. Perhaps disappointingly, there was no criticism of my choice of book, and I duly bought it. You can still buy books at 16 Fleet Street. It is now a branch of the excellent legal booksellers Wildys, and they have tempting titles such as Evidence of Bad Character and Barnsley’s Land Options in the window. But it’s not all dry stuff: they can also sell you a copy of Lawyers’ Latin for a little light relief. People talk about the more obvious changes in Fleet Street. For me the most significant was the loss of Mr Simmonds’s excellent bookshop.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 26 © Christopher Gibson 2010


About the contributor

Christopher Gibson is a barrister who worked for many years in the Temple and Lincoln’s Inn, where he had easy access to the delights of old Fleet Street. He now works in Bloomsbury, and the only place he misses in his old stamping ground is El Vino’s.

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