Bury My Heart At W. H. Smith’s

What I felt inwardly was that I was undergoing a sort of personal renaissance. Overloaded with books and prints, that shabby little bookshop seemed the richest in the world. Its dust was hallowed.

This is what it looked like to my innocent 1947 eye.

The name over the shop says Sanders & Co. It also says Salutation House; there was once an inn of that name on the site. The shop is situated in Oxford’s High Street, nearly opposite St Mary the Virgin Church. The shilling shelves are on the left as you enter.

Hang on. In the shilling shelves are many books, all at that magic price, some of them worth a deal more to the right buyer. When the shop closes, someone staggers out of the shop with a huge black shutter which locks over the front of the shelves. Me.

This was the first job I did at Sanders. At the interview with the old man, he asked, ‘When would you be prepared to start?’

‘Now?’ I asked.

‘Now,’ he said. I was set to tidying the shilling shelves. I remember one of the books I tidied, that first afternoon. It was Lalla Rookh by Tom Moore, a friend of Byron’s. Time was when no self-respecting home was without a copy of Lalla Rookh. Many editions came off the mills, some bound in Russian leather, padded with cotton wool.

Moore was a jolly man, ever prepared to sing for his supper, and he had a sharp, observant eye, as his diaries show. Sad to say, many copies of Lalla Rookh went out to Sanders’ shilling shelves during my time there. Every dog his day …

A rich but chastening environment for a budding author is a bookshop.

Sanders’ shop is a long narrow dark secretive overstocked gallimaufry of a bookshop, comparing unfavourably in roominess with the crew quarters of one of Nelson’s ships. Packed under its low beams is a profusion of ill-sorted stock. From folios to duodecimos, an impressive range of volumes presents itself or lurks in obscurity.

Nor are there only books here. Maps, prints, engravings, hang wherever there is space. These are Sanders’ specialities. The old maps – Speeds, Saxtons, Mordens – mainly of the English counties, mop up what light filters in from outside while remaining themselves beautiful, cryptic, and severe in their Hogarth frames. The elegance of those frames!

Halfway towards the rear of the shop is a door which gives on to a twisting stair which leads up to Mr Sanders’ office and, beyond that, the rare book room where few are allowed to go. On the staircase is a framed engraving of Dr Johnson short-sightedly reading a 32mo.

Mind your head as we get to the rear compartment of the shop downstairs. Here, besides rows of books small and gigantic, such as Mrs Jekyll’s Country Life books, we come to the stove, a desk, a gate cutting off the cellar, and the till.

The till is a wooden affair with a narrow slot in its top, through which one may write on a roll of paper

Ensor’s England … … 1. 1. 0.

The till opens with a ting, the paper drum rolls on, and the assistant deposits a guinea in the correct wooden partitions.

Above the till is a window which allows a ration of light into this section of the shop, although the ration is so feeble that electric lights burn all day. The window is partly obscured by an old hurdy-gurdy which hangs there. It is Italian, and has to be tucked under the chin like a violin and wound by a small handle. Occasionally, Sanders, a music-lover, will take it down and play a melody.

Oh, yes, a strong whiff of the nineteenth century still clings to Sanders’ shop. This is the first taste I have had of England since I was a child when, at seventeen, I was swallowed up into the British Army. I am intoxicated by the strangeness of everything. I half-read all the books, flitting from one to another, while at the same time dreaming my private dreams of sex and science fiction.

Beyond the hurdy-gurdy is a last section, filled in part by a small office and a packing booth. The books here, tucked at the rear of the shop, are of less tempting varieties. This is the resort of Classical textbooks, Agriculture and Logic. There is also a narrow space behind the Classics, very unpopular with assistants, in which some stationery is housed: the humdrum things that students need, particularly the students from Oriel College, next to the shop, such as loose-leaf books, refills for same, pencils, notebooks, and the like.

In the office sits Mrs Y. In the packing booth stands Mr Watts.

I bring in a book for despatch abroad.

‘That ’on’t go today,’ says Mr Watts.

Although this is not all Mr Watts says, it is possibly his most characteristic utterance. Watts is a kindly, crusty man, with teeth of fierce yellow and a tisicking cough, both cough and yellowness caught from the old pipe he constantly smokes. Uncomplainingly, he works all day with paper and string, making the odd excursion to the post office in St Aldate’s, or delivering a package to a college nearby. His movements as he works are leisurely and professional. He never wastes an inch of string.

After about four in the afternoon, when a sort of drowse overcomes the shop in general, as the lack of air gets to us all, and Mrs Y makes a pot of tea for us, Mr Watts views further candidates for posting with an increasingly jaundiced eye and larger clouds of smoke, and utters again his immortal phrase, ‘That ’on’t go today.’

Beyond Mr Watts’ cubbyhole is a door into the rear premises. The shelves here are rather makeshift, stuffed with books in wild disorder, books bought cheap and unloved. They lie now, idle and unemployed, volumes on brass and beadwork and brassica crops and ballet and the breaststroke and Bastien-Lepage and Brittany and Buckingham, to venture no further into the alphabet.

Even this is not the end of everything. There are rickety back stairs, where once the maids of the Salutation Inn carried up trays of porter to gentlemen dining privately in upper rooms. On the stairs, on every step, more books are piled, right up to the top. They are making their way upstairs. There is hope for them. Some will enjoy the privilege of being catalogued by that shy, charming, poetic man you probably meet just here. He is polite, amusing, and already a little bald. He is just the company a new assistant wants, and is recently down from Merton. His name is Roger Lancelyn Green.

Roger is no more. At that time, he had written a delicate fantasy or two, some poems, and a book on Andrew Lang. He was destined to become quite famous and to marry a pleasant Oxford lady. Later would come his involvement with Lewis Carroll. At present we will leave him cataloguing books on the stairs and peering into a first edition of Douglas Jerrold’s Mrs Caudle’s Curtain Lectures, which were at that time still sought after in Oxford.

If we turned left past Roger, we should enter the rare book store behind Mr Sanders’ office. Instead, we turn right where the stair twists, and find ourselves in Heaven.

This is the highest part of the ancient building, highest and untidiest. Its one dusty window looks out across the broken rooftops of Oxford.

In imitation of the real thing, Heaven is damp and leaky. Here, Dickensian charm and creative vandalism go hand-in-hand.

Many are the old books which find their way into Sanders’ clutches. Some are fashion or natural history books. Some are of a topographical nature, illustrated by steel engravings or etchings: views of English countryside, foreign views, views of Oxford colleges. Sometimes the bindings of such volumes may be torn. Sometimes the text may be considered dull. Then the book can be broken up and the illustrations or maps sold separately. And sold especially well when coloured and mounted. This applies with particular force to that beautiful octavo book in three volumes, Ingram’s Memorials of Oxford, many sets of which, entering the premises of Salutation House, find themselves broken up for the sake of the engravings of colleges within. Good complete sets must by now be extremely scarce.

The breaking, the mounting, the colouring, is done in Heaven. Here, at benches under a dusty window, sit Sheila and Miss Worms, working away with their watercolours. Mr Rudolph Ackermann’s Repository of the Arts, which produced many fine illustrated books last century, must have been just such a place as Heaven, housing folk who had fled from the Terror in France after the Revolution. We find an echo of that here in Heaven: the cheerful and teasing Miss Worms is in fact a refugee from Hitler’s Reich. As for Sheila, she is young and pert and pretty, and I once fancied myself in love with her.

So to the stock room behind Sanders’ office. Here are the scarcest books, the most precious, the most cherished. The stock room is subdivided. In a small locked room called Pickle rest those books deemed most scarce, most precious, most cherished, by the miserly Sanders. These regal favourites are drawn up in ranks, gaining in value … We mentioned Mr Ackermann; here stand no fewer than seventeen sets of Ackermann’s History of Oxford, in two volumes, full of lovely coloured plates of colleges. There are even a few sets of Ackermann’s Cambridge. Together with many other books, some mildly pornographic, which Sanders could not bear to sell.

In the stock room you may come across a set of Peacock’s novels in tree-calf, or a complete set of Thomas Hardy’s first editions, all bound uniform (but this is vandalism) in blue buckram, together with many other prizes. In huge wooden cases, specially made by Mr Watts, are stored Hogarth’s engravings of London life and Piranesi’s engravings of prisons and of Rome, in various states. There are also some Rowlandsons. Such Rowlandsons! Country scenes, bawdy scenes, inns, maidens, stage coaches, the whole eighteenth-century world which Thomas Rowlandson’s calligraphic line so skilfully evoked.

I had never heard of Rowlandson until I went into Mr Sanders’ stock room, and have worshipped the man’s work ever since. He was unrivalled as a draughtsman until Beardsley drew. In Mr Sanders’ house on the Woodstock Road hung perhaps ten lilting Rowlandsons, country landscapes of the greatest delicacy of line and colour. No doubt they are now in the Paul Mellon collection. Over Sanders’ mantelpiece hung a pristine print of the painting generally regarded as Rowlandson’s masterpiece, ‘Vauxhall Gardens’.

As far as Rowlandson is known, he is valued for his scenes of bawdy, of boisterousness and drinking bouts. But with that subject matter goes a style of transparent delicacy. His creamy young Georgian maids might have stepped out of Cranford or a novel by Thomas Hardy. A travelling print-seller used to come round and sell Sanders pornographic Rowlandsons for his gentlemen clients.

Without being judgmental, Thomas Rowlandson elegantly recorded an England at once awful and enviable. I owe my introduction to him to Frank Sanders – another amusing bounder.

2

Three Pounds a Week

Two people served with me in the shop. One and a half to be precise. The half was Mrs Y, who did the accounts as well as serving, and so was generally tucked away in the downstairs office. She was always ready to emerge for a chat. If she was asked for a book by a customer, Mrs Y would fall into a mild, ladylike panic. With one finger up to her lip, she would go slowly round in circles, cooing, ‘Oh, dear, have we got that now, I wonder? What an interesting question. Where would it be, I wonder? What did you say the title was again?’, until Bill Oliver or I rescued her.

Bill Oliver had been a scholar of St John’s College, and had served with the Eighth Army in the desert. Now he wore a blue suit and a large ginger moustache, over which his grey eyes bulged in accusatory fashion. He looked ferocious, yet I never met a milder man. He worked long hours without complaint. He was married to a distinguished, smiling, foreign lady, relation, it was said, of Robert Musil, author of The Man Without Qualities – a novel I never managed to get through, despite the local connection.

In those days, following the war and paper-rationing, there was a scarcity of books, with the consequence that everybody wanted them. The shop, at least during the university term, was always full of people asking for books we did not have. We sold a small number of new books; but those were often rationed by the publishers.

The representative for Oxford University Press was a tall thin man called Mr Lathom. He had a face like a kind lemon, his expression fostered by the number of times he had to say no as gently as possible. If we ordered six copies of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary for the beginning of term, we would be lucky to get one. At that time shortages were a way of life.

All the staff in Sanders got along well together, which was fortunate, since we worked long hours. I had to be there at a quarter to nine. I had an hour and a half for lunch. The shop closed at five thirty, but we were expected to work until at least six thirty, often seven. Many a time it was eight. That was the worst of Sanders, that and the pay.

At five thirty, Sanders would come down from his office, smoking his pipe, to see that everything was secure, shutters up and door locked. We would all light cigarettes and ‘get down to the real work’.

Frank Sanders was a small vigorous man with a perky face and a quiff of white hair. He resembled Max Beerbohm’s caricature of Arnold Bennett. He was a humorous man and in many ways a terrible crook; he kept us destitute and laughing.

Sanders was sincere in certain matters. His love of music, books and Rowlandson could not be faulted. He also had the gift of the gab, and this led him into areas of insincerity.

Middle-aged ladies flocked to Sanders, just as they flocked to the lectures of C. S. Lewis, who was then at Magdalen College and occasionally came into the shop. The ladies tried to charm Frank Sanders, but Frank Sanders always charmed the ladies more. Wives of heads of colleges were his natural victims. In the course of intimate conversations, when the ladies were led up to his office, books and money would change hands, valuable prints would turn into more valuable cheques. Sanders would then escort the ladies to the door with amiable courtesy.

Directly they had gone, the mask would fall. He would stamp back into the rear of the shop. ‘Oh, that Lady –! How she talks, how she wastes my time. I can’t bear the woman. She’s humbug all through …’

Frank Sanders was a self-made man. He began with no advantages in life, beyond the resources of his brain. As a youth in North Devon he sold newspapers for W. H. Smith’s on Barnstaple railway station. I too once lived in Barnstaple; this gave us something in common, and allowed him the opportunity to pay me less than I was worth.