Mark McGinness celebrates the rich history of London's most storied bookshop
Giving a twist to Dr Johnson’s “When a man is tired of London; he is tired of life”, American editor, Roger Kimball, has suggested, “When a man is tired of Heywood Hill, he is tired of books.”
The eponymous bookshop at 10 Curzon Street, Mayfair is 90 today. On 3 August 1936 George Heywood Hill (always Heywood), a young Old Etonian (just thirty), after a seven-year apprenticeship with veteran bookseller Charles Sawyer in Grafton Street (“everything suitable for a gentleman’s library”), established his own shop, first, at 17 Curzon Street; then, when the lease expired in 1942, at a former dress shop at No 10. And so it has remained, despite three changes of ownership, essentially unchanged.
Someone dubbed it “the biggest little bookshop in the world” while Heywood called it “a tiny first-class kennel for underdogs”; Evelyn Waugh described it, in the early forties, as “a centre for all that was left of fashionable and intellectual London”. Celebrating its fiftieth birthday, antiquarian James Fergusson saw “behind the Georgian bow window ……. [inside] like an overdressed West End stage-set ….marbled pillars with bold gold Ionic capitals are borrowed for a proscenium; a white panelled front room gives way to an unlikely bright burgundy backstage sanctum, and the books, like Helen Hanff props, tumble too neatly on the rich red carpet.” The chandeliered rooms, fireplace and chimney-piece give it the feel of a most clubbable club.
Heywood was joined by a delivery boy and an assistant, Lady Anne Gathorne-Hardy, only daughter of the 3rd Earl of Cranbrook and sister of two experts in the world of rare books, Bob and Eddie. It was Eddie who inspired Waugh’s flamboyant gossip columnist, Miles Malpractice, in Vile Bodies. For nine months she had been engaged to the diarist and country house saviour, James Lees-Milne, who described her as “truly one of the world’s worthwhile women, so intelligent, male-minded and deliciously humorous. She is “a dark mare” and worth a million more than the glittering women…” Her untidiness and his fastidiousness led to an end to their betrothal but a fond friendship endured.
In February 1938, Lady Anne and Heywood married and would enjoy a happy union for half a century. A Bookseller’s War (1997), their correspondence after Heywood enlisted in December 1942, offers a vivid glimpse into their relationship. At the recommendation of Lees-Milne, Nancy Mitford, hard-up, at a loose end and on her own as her feckless, unfaithful husband, Peter Rodd, served abroad, joined the firm as manager in March 1942. She was paid £3 10s a week. She would sometimes walk from her little house in Maida Vale to Mayfair. Accosted once by a serviceman, who put his arm around her, she shot back, “Leave me alone. I’m forty.”
Nancy – or the Hon Mrs Rodd, which she preferred in correspondence – brought a gaiety, acclaim and swank to the shop. As Michael Bloch put it, “As the bombs rained down, G. Heywood Hill Ltd established itself as a literary salon.” The literary beau monde and half the Free French frequented. When another bookseller commented on the smallness of the shop, Nancy explained that her customers “love being pressed bosom to bosom.”
Of course the Free French loved her; but she could be frosty with some Americans – who wandered in from the hostel next door. They called the shop “The Ministry of Fear”. But she had a soft spot for “the Sarge”, Stuart Preston, Yale graduate and son of a New York banker who lived near the shop and mesmerised London’s wartime gratin during the war. Waugh drew on him for “the Loot,” Lieutenant Padfield, in the last of his war trilogy, Unconditional Surrender
Heywood’s Etonian pals - Anthony Powell, Harold Acton, Cyril Connolly - would wander in. One customer, exasperated at Nancy’s seemingly endless phone call, exclaimed, “A few less Darlings and a little more Service please.”
One night she forgot to lock up the shop and the following morning she turned up to find a shop full of customers trying to buy books from each other. Unfortunately/fortunately, Heywood, on leave, dropped in before her to witness the chaos. But Nancy proved a natural - she knew titles, prices, publishers – even reviews. It was she who coined the term ‘couches’ - piles of books constantly being added to on tables and then forgotten.
What changed her life was meeting Gaston Palewski, the Parisien son of a Jewish industrialist from Belarus and Charles de Gaulle's chef de cabinet and homme de confiance. He and Nancy met at the Allies Club in London in 1942 and she fell irrevocably in love – with him, and with France. She would call him ‘Colonel’. He may have been short and stocky with a face like ‘an unpeeled King Edward’ but he was a consummate saloniste and practised lover. A committed Anglophile (he had spent a post-graduate year at Oxford) and when Nancy met him he was already welcome in the drawing rooms of Ladies Colefax and Cunard. As he had in Paris: Proust had been a pal and those who inspired Marcel were also friends of Gaston. Within weeks of meeting they were lovers.
Nancy, transformed and inspired, began a new novel and, in her spare time, had written 10,000 words before asking Heywood for three months leave to complete it. She spent the time in the eccentric luxury of Faringdon, the country house in Oxfordshire of her friend, the composer, Lord Berners, and his multi-coloured doves. Her book completed, she returned to the shop in June 1945. While the Colonel was the romantic lead, Fabrice; Berners inspired Lord Merlin. The result, The Pursuit of Love, published in December 1945 was a classic – a triumph for Nancy, bringing her fame, funds and freedom.
Itching to live in Paris she initially sought to establish a branch of the bookshop there but instead took up writing full-time. Her family dubbed her “The French Lady Writer”. But she remained in touch with Heywood for the rest of her life. More than 300 spikey, sparkling letters survive and were published as The Bookshop at 10 Curzon Street: Letters between Nancy Mitford and Heywood Hill, 1952-1973, edited by John Saumarez Smith.
There is also a novel, The Bookseller's Secret by Michelle Gable (2021) set in the bookshop in the early 1940's with Nancy in charge and a parallel plot, 80 years on, of a novelist with writer's block working in Curzon Street discovering the manuscript of a lost memoir by Nancy.
As Nancy departed Heywood took on a new partner, Handasyde (‘Handy’) Buchanan whose wife, Mollie, was already in charge of accounts. As Waugh’s biographer, Selina Hastings, noted, “Handy turned out to be a curmudgeonly character, possessing all ‘the concealed malice of the underdog’, as Evelyn Waugh so memorably put it; before long, and with the able assistance of the poisonous Mollie, he had effortlessly succeeded in alienating staff and customers alike. By the time Heywood sold the shop in 1964 he had been so bloodied and bruised by the Buchanans that instead of staying on in a consultative capacity, as he had planned, he was obliged to sever all communication with Curzon Street, not even daring to have his hair cut, as was his long-established custom, at Trumper’s [Gentlemen’s Barbers and Perfumers (est. 1875)], next door.”
In 1946 Elizabeth Forbes joined the team on being demobbed from the WRNS, and then, after three years' bookselling in Stockholm, worked full-time from 1950 until 1973. Jamie Fergusson recalled that she was wined and dined by Gore Vidal and Harold Acton; had a long correspondence with Patrick White and posted him fish-kettles from Elizabeth David. She served John Le Carre and Marlene Dietrich; fielded book requests from Graham Greene and Somerset Maugham; Ian Fleming telegrammed from Jamaica.
In September 1965, the Monday after the Friday Heywood retired, John Saumarez Smith, urbane, diligent, Wykehamist and seventh-generation Cambridge man joined the shop. In the same year, Heywood sold the shop to Henry Viner. As Heywood’s appointee and a cousin of Anne’s sister-in-law, Saumarez Smith was already the enemy. Heywood followed the battle with great interest from afar and in 2006 John edited A Spy in the Bookshop: Letters between Heywood Hill and John Saumarez Smith, 1966-1974. Lady Selina said “it might be described as reports from the front line in an ongoing shop war which had begun exactly as the other war ended.”
In 1971 financier David Bacon bought the business from Viner and finally sacked Mollie - Heywood having sacked her five times only to see her turn up to work as usual the next morning. Handy finally retired in 1974 and Saumarez Smith became director. He became one of The booksellers of his time. Fergusson has described him as "behaving like a grand tailor .... with a voice like silk treacle ... running the shop like a club.... antique hand-written bills appear occasionally, but months afterwards. Every book is like present, every transaction. An act of courtesy."
In 1991, Nancy's brother-in-law, Deborah (Debo) Mitford’s husband, Andrew Cavendish, the 11th Duke of Devonshire, to whom she had sent books during his service abroad, bought an interest in the shop. Their London townhouse was around the corner. He quipped that he spent so much money there he may as well buy the business.
On Andrew Devonshire’s death in 2004, his and Debo’s son, Stoker, inherited the dukedom, Chatsworth and Heywood Hill. He bought the business in its entirety in 2013.
After Saumarez Smith retired in 2008 (he died in 2021), sales plummeted. In came Nicky Dunne, the new duke’s son-in-law. The duke told Francis Wheen he and Nicky had met for coffee at his club, Pratt’s nearby. (When his father was asked if he belonged to Pratt’s His Grace replied, “No, it belongs to me”) “Nicky….. came along and offered to take over - whom I knew very well by then, as he’d been my son-in-law for some time.” Nicky, a political communications consultant, admitted he knew “not a thing” about bookselling; “not a dickey bird”; but he had always enjoyed “rootling around” in bookshops. He became ‘bookseller-in-chief’ and chairman and the shop has thrived ever since.
While Saumarez Smith had cultivated the literary salon nurtured by Nancy and took consummate care with his clients (many christened him ‘my bookseller’), Nicky and his team extended and elevated the trade to literary curation. ‘A Year in Books’ range of global book subscriptions was initiated providing six two-book parcels annually, either tailored to a recipient after interviewing them or organised around a theme like Tradecraft, the shop’s name for its espionage fiction subscription. “These are human rhythms as opposed to algorithms.”
Most recently, in conjunction with Tina Brown the shop has launched ‘Refuse To Be Scared’ with titles chosen by eminent journalists.
Since its inception in 2013 tens of thousands of customers have been part of A Year In Books with recipients in over 80 countries, including every state in the US. Every year the shop creates around 30 private and corporate libraries around the world on any subject under the sun, with briefs ranging from the specific ‘dragonflies’ to the more general ‘1000 good books to read before I die’. Overall two-thirds of the shop’s customers are from the United States – Nancy’s mock anti-Americanism well behind them.
The New York Times’s Sarah Lyall has written of an Englishman who used to live in Switzerland who flies his own plane, wanting ‘every combat aviation memoir from the 20th Century’ - 2000 volumes. There was also the history of capitalism: the good, the bad and the ugly (1500 volumes); a country house library (2000 volumes); Ireland in all its glory (2500 volumes); the great American novel (300 volumes); and every novel set in Hong Kong (500 volumes).
On Bastille Day in mid-July, days before her 79th birthday, The Queen, a great reader and literacy crusader, was greeted at 10 Curzon Street by Nicky Dunne to mark Heywood Hill’s 90th birthday and confirm its Royal Warrant as 'Bookseller to The Queen' – joining the blue plaque to Nancy on the shop front. Her Majesty wrapped a book – Catherine Ostler’s The Renoir Girls - for a subscription customer in the shop’s trademark brown paper and its blue grosgrain ribbon. A postcard signed by Queen Camilla will be hidden in one subscriber’s next parcel of books.
The Queen had the same Reading Consultation that the shop offers other subscribers. She chatted informally about her admiration for Elizabeth Jane Howard’s The Cazalet Chronicles and her love of books of all kinds and other favourite authors such as William Boyd, Alexandre Dumas and Amor Towels. She admitted she did not like, in Her words, the "Sky-fi" genre – but today for Heywood Hill, having survived the Blitz in the forties, the sky is the limit.
