Free For the Time Being by Dirk Bogarde Page B

December 1992

My Favourite Bookshop

John Sandoe, London
    I really can’t remember when I first went into John Sandoe’s shop in those squashed little cottages in Blacklands Terrace. I only know that it was years ago and that I was not, as I now am, a regular client.
    I wandered in from time to time looking, usually, for something which was out of print or which no other bookseller had come around to stocking. I also went there when I had only the vaguest knowledge of what I wanted. ‘It’s got “Earth” in the title, it’s not about hunting but there is a fox, and I can’t remember the publisher.’ That sort of idiocy. But I got my copy of
Gone to Earth
by Mary Webb (that’s how long ago it was).
    I believe that the shop in those days belonged to a Mr Chatto, who was youngish and obliging and who seemed permanently to be pushing through an avalanche of books. Just, indeed, as the present owners do today. I remember first seeing the shop when I was a student up the road at Chelsea Polytechnic. I was ambling down a calm King’s Road to my bus stop outside Peter Jones, almost opposite the flat where Percy Grainger lived, and bought a packet of five Player’s cigarettes from what was then a seedy little newsagent and tobacconist.
    Later, much later, after the war, Mr Chatto was installed, and after him John Sandoe came along, in 1957, and that is when I first really took notice of what was soon to become a ‘singular bookshop’, as opposed to just a bookseller. There is, as we know today, a marked difference between them.
    Living, as I did then, in the country and seldom coming into London, I made only rare visits to the crammed and cramped little shop, and sought, as always, something that was out of print, lost, or published the year before. Something, anyway, difficult to get.
    Sandoe catered for those oddities wonderfully well, just as today his successors, Rubio, Johnny, Sean, Stewart and the engaging, encyclopedic Perina (whose name I never can remember and in consequence just call ‘Lady’), do with undiminished fervour and flair.
    The absolute love of books which this shop engenders is hugely joyous. One feels that two hours spent in one or other of the jammed little rooms – there are four as far as I remember at this instance: two down, one up, and one in the cellar – will be rewarding, refreshing and never questioned by the owners. Indeed, they will often join you in your quest, because, frankly, up in the paperback room the wealth of works, the sliding panels concealing book upon book, the spinning towers stacked with glossy pocket editions bewilder the most ardent browser.
    But the staff seem to know, with uncanny skill, just exactly where Molly Keane, Belloc and Brontë hide, where the erudite tomes on whatever theme are to be found.
    A bookshop should be a familiar place, somewhere one goes for the sheer love of books, for the smell and the feel of them, for the companionship of others who share the joy of touching, holding, reading and learning. In the supermarket booksellers with their dizzying displays, their pyramids of bestsellers, one is intimidated, constantly lost in the wealth of glittering titles, bemused by a request answered by a computer which indicates the number of copies held of the title one has asked for, the price, position on the shelf, shelf position in the shop. Tills ring, green lights flash, and buying a book becomes as simple and as uninvolving as buying a packet of envelopes.
    John Sandoe’s is not like this at all. I well remember starting out to learn how to cook, after sixty years of inertia, and asking ‘Lady’ for help. She instantly strode across the shop and took a book from among thousands and assured me that it contained all I would ever need to know about cooking for
ever.
She was right. I have used it until it has powdered. She knew instantly, among the bewildering wall of cookery books, the