A Bookstore

Bookstore Light

I like to think of London as a city of old bookstores like the beautiful one in the film “84 Charing Cross Road” with Anne Bancroft and Anthony Hopkins. Dim, musty little places with floor to ceiling bookshelves, threadbare Persian carpets, and piles of yellowing papers, presided over by an all-knowing, tweedy man with myopic spectacles and uneven teeth, a perfectly clipped British accent.

The London bookstore is chilly, postwar, little heat save for the steam that rises from the electric kettle and the sputtering radiator. The people who work here wear fingerless gloves, vests, sensible shoes, jackets, and artfully tied mufflers. The bookstore has a name like Twickenhams or Tweedletons, and outside it is always snowing drifty flakes over the four o’clock streets. There is a bell that jingles over the door, and when the erudite man in the myopic spectacles closes up for the night, the bell jings and jangles and wakes up all of the writers sleeping between their covers, tucked in their pages, snug beneath their sentences.

Midnight. If you listen closely, you can hear them all: a cacophony of glorious voices, British-tinged like tea, like biscuits, like heavy-duty wellies, and bumpershoots, like England herself all bejeweled in emeralds and opals, rushing pell-mell to the sea.

In this bookstore, anything can happen: a journey to a far-off land, a poem, a plot, a revolutionary idea, even a love affair. Hang onto your wooly hat.