Bookshops

My wife and I returned to the provinces on Monday, having enjoyed a capital weekend’s shopping in Stockholm. For me, one of the foremost luxuries of our three days away was simply being able to browse the shelves of some particularly well-stocked bookshops: notably Hedengrens on Stureplan, Akademibokhandeln on Master Samuelsgatan, and Rönnells, a large antiquarian bookseller on Birger Jarlsgatan. Even though part of the ground floor of the building which houses the Hotel Mañana, and with it our apartment, is occupied by a bookshop of sorts, its stock of English-language material is necessarily limited to the kind of books one might find in a third-rate airport, and thus is not conducive to lazy browsing.

Oftentimes, just picking up a book will remind me of the time and the place where I bought it, and the other books I bought, or was thinking of buying, at the same time. Ordering books on-line, whilst eminently convenient, does not carry with it, for me, this charge of associative recall, and consequently seems, overall, a slightly less satisfying experience. Besides that, I value the element of serendipity that still plays a larger part in my experience of physical bookshops than of virtual ones.

Until my twentieth year, I seldom bought books at all, considering them items one borrowed rather than owned. During the first of my London summers, I began to haunt the Pan Bookshop on the Fulham Road, and the branches of Waterstone’s on the Old Brompton Road and Kensington High St, and took my first baby steps in accumulating a library of my own. Very few of the Penguins and Picadors I purchased back then are still with me, but I still cherish the copy of Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table I bought at that time, and my battered, second-hand copy of Heaney and Hughes’ anthology The Rattle Bag which I was delighted to find in an Oxfam shop, on sale for only a pound.

Over the years I’ve had cause to be grateful to many fine book-selling establishments, but will mention two more in particular, which opened my eyes or expanded my mind in specific but different ways: ‘Oriel’, a bookstore/gallery in Cardiff, sadly now defunct, that, by some fortunate, government-funded oversight was able to stock virtually every book of poetry then in print, and which was where I discovered Akhmatova, Lorca, Mandelstam and Montale, amongst others; and the Anglo-American Bookstore on via della Vite in Rome, where I found a two-volume reprint of Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, and from where I bought Frances Yates’ The Art of Memory and Couliano’s Eros, Magic and the Renaissance, to name just a few among many.