Slightly Foxed > An Index to Slightly Foxed > Bookshops and bookselling

Bookshops and bookselling

[2] 5; [6] 5; [13] 6; [18] 6; Mike Petty on, [8] 88; John Saumarez Smith on, [2] 63, [4] 40, [10] 59, [12] 53, [16] 40; Frances Wood on, [26] 91; C. J. Wright on, [13] 89

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Doing a Runner

John Saumarez Smith on bookshops and bookselling

In 2002 Anthony Rota, a fourth-generation bookseller, published his memoirs of the antiquarian trade. He has known it for most of his life whereas I only came into it in 1965 after graduating from Cambridge. I was based in Curzon Street, while his shop was in Savile Row, but both of us might well have used the title of his book, Books in the Blood. In it he recalled some of the deals he had done, as well as two or three that he had notably missed, the many friends he made and the life of a West End bookshop before the era of the Internet.
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The Passing of a Bookseller

C. J. Wright on the bookseller John Stephens

He was still looking for that last volume. If anyone could have found it, he could. That’s how good he was at his trade. As I stood at the graveside on a bright spring day, on that exposed ridge above the Evenlode valley, I supposed that now I would never possess a copy – that the one book for which I had been searching so long had eluded me. Then I felt guilty that I was thinking of myself and not of him. It was, after all, his day.

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