A Tale of Two Bookshops

This time around I ventured into Daunt Books, which had caught my attention on an early stroll towards the Wallace Collection. Inside the 'olde worlde' bookshop the first thing I noticed were the new Nabokovs neatly placed on the counter, giving me ample opportunity to leaf through it before the event in the evening. Downstairs they had a good travel section which featured no Daniel Metcalfe but the magazine which featured an article by Bijan Omrani and one by Alexander Morrison. I thought I'd discovered something rather extraordinary but when I opened the door to Alice's place, the issue was staring at me from the armchair- she'd placed it there, she said later, thinking I would enjoy seeing it. I am an open book! Daunt also had what looked like locals with their travel cases on wheels, doing their last minute book-shopping. There was no Nicholas Coleridge to be had.

At the Hatchard's next day I first asked for the Nabokov with renewed interest and all the staff lifted up their heads to look at me like meerkats and said sadly that it had not yet come in. I resolved to buy some Bennett and indeed, another lady was asking for him at the counter. There were a good number of signed copies of books- including Coleridge's Deadly Sins (which I bought) and William Dalrymple (which I thought was too expensive at 20 pounds). Downstairs Adam Thirlwell's Politics was there where I'd left it summer 2008, and there were two ladies talking about the wretched estate agents that harassed them about their 'houses'. One of them was going to some (important) one's house and said proudly that she was 'dining there on 5th December'. Upstairs I sat and read Rory's introduction to Arabian Sands in which he says that only as an Etonian can he understand what Thesiger says when he says 'First Field Colours'. There were also some copies of Metcalfe's book.