Street-level dealing in the Eighties was a useful demonstration of Thatcherite economics: the survival of the unfittest, those who started out with inherited fortunes and managed, more by luck than judgement, not to lose them. It was in 1980 that I stepped back from poetry and Clive Linklater took over Bookmans Halt, retaining the given name and carrying the business forward, with a proper respect (untouched, unimproved), into a more volatile period. Shell-shocked freelancers reacted to Thatcher’s iron claw in different ways. Some became electively homeless, lost on the road. Like Driff, who leapt straight onto one of Lord Tebbit’s mythic bikes, they were rootless in pursuit of the deal. The old centre, with its antiquarian book depositories, was under attack by what Patrick Keiller in his film London saw as a tyranny of the suburbs. You not only abolish local government, old leftist power bases, but also the idea of the local. You treat locality as a sentimental indulgence. And you throw the market open to every form of international money laundering, arms dealing and economic boosterism. An ideal climate for the endgame book pirate. The one whose only property is a flapping black attaché case. Whose office is a telephone in a motorway service station.
Many of those traumatized, chemically fuelled desperados—the ones I called “out-patients”—were remnants of the dream of the Sixties: almost rock stars, unsponsored poets, premature ecologists, hedge scholars without tenure. Writers, attached to the myth of heroic modernism, collected books and texts, to excuse themselves from the trouble of writing them. Through my catalogues I met a number of artists, film-makers and archivists who justified the hoarding of locked-room mysteries, pseudonymous drug shockers, lesbian vampire porn, leather-boy pulps, surrealism, uranianism, Ripperology, by seeing this fetish as a discipline for sustaining cultural value. In the way that Ray Bradbury’s characters in Fahrenheit 451 took on themselves the responsibility of committing books to memory in a period when libraries were condemned to be burnt. And that sense of exile from the political nexus, of random movement, is seductive. Chris Petit’s 1979 film, Radio On, stretches its time frame to feature length by electing to take the old road from London to Bristol—with a psychotic squaddie from Northern Ireland, Silbury Hill, frozen English fields and pylons, and the nervy soundtrack of the moment. It’s a classic book-hunting trip, without books. Petit became one of my steadiest customers, building up a Soho bibliography for his novel Robinson as soon as the economics of independent film-making collapsed.
I have demonstrated how the atmosphere of predatory book dealing in the Seventies and Eighties infected my prose style. Those sketches of Bookmans Halt in its last days are, obviously, overcoloured and in love with entropy. But they are no crueller than Linklater’s own Withnail and I diary of a year’s reckless trading gambits. Clive relishes the uncombed hair, the blackened, bacon-wedged teeth of customers and dealers. The station-sleeping uniform of mildewed coat and fingerless gloves. The fat newspapers, marked for charity sales, doubling as overnight insulation. He knows that Bohemia Road is the ultimate sieve for the floating detritus of abandoned collections, unwilled retirement ballast. Bookmans Halt is the last net before the English Channel. Linklater visits every town within a thirty-five-mile radius of Hastings. “In places where on previous trips I left behind bookshops and antique shops, now I find estate agents and building society branches.” He is so desperate to bring something home that he spends £15 on a copy of Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management, previously employed as a chopping board for vegetables, and a Florence Nightingale autograph that proves to be kosher. Unfortunately, it didn’t come from the “Lady with the Lamp”, but a volunteer, with the same name, working part time in the Bexhill Oxfam shop. This signature, Linklater admits, “is only worth something when it’s written on a cheque”. The fact that it was written in biro might have been a clue.
I never came away from Bookmans Halt with treasure, but I didn’t come away empty-handed either. The bargains, the steals that made my week, turned up in Bury St Edmunds, the Channel Islands, Taunton, Rotterdam, Rutland. That pristine, yellow and red first edition of Bram Stoker’s Dracula being offered for 50p, because “nobody wants hardbacks these days”, alongside a newish paperback with a movie tie-in cover at £2. The copy of John Lennon’s In His Own Write scraped from the floor under the Portobello Road flyover. The one inscribed by all the Beatles, their girlfriends of the moment, and Helen Shapiro. The Turgenev presented by D.H. Lawrence to Jessie Chambers, the “Miriam” of Sons and Lovers. The pocket edition Henry James with his holograph corrections. Such items would not have survived ten minutes in Linklater’s shop. Clive’s prices were so modest, his stock so comfortably resident that no visit was time wasted. I thought of a phrase by the poet Lee Harwood, perched down the coast in Hove: “besieged decency”. That was what Clive really specialized in. That’s what was threatened and now lost.
When I stopped dealing and started writing, I used Bookmans Halt like a reference library. I accessed research materials and oddball items I never knew that I needed. A Saturday morning walk up the hill was my form of beachcombing, without a metal detector. I always returned with a bag of finds to smuggle into the flat, purchased for the price of a couple of weekend broadsheets and much better value.
More than all this carnivalesque detail, Bookmans Halt was a fixed point in a shifting world, even though its interior was under constant revision. Towards the end, when the legend—where do they come from and where do they go?—no longer had to be supported, Clive presented me with a yellow scrap of paper on which was outlined a history of Bohemia Road assembled by Edward Preston. You witness the shop dissolving through its various disguises, up there on the ridge at the outer limit of the architect James Burton’s vision of a Georgian speculation known as St Leonards-on-Sea. Or, as its promoter would have it, Burton’s St Leonards.
In the early years of the twentieth century, number 127 Bohemia Road was occupied by the Liberal Club. The Liberals declining, an antique dealer called Mr Martin took a punt, before handing over to Stone Brothers, manufacturers of rat traps. (Strange how just the right names attach themselves to this property. I made a number of expeditions to the south coast with the best scout of his generation, the rock guitarist Martin Stone. Martin was the inspiration for one of the characters in White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings. On a run to Hastings, we came across a posthumous collection of books from the library of the Vorticist photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn. I still have a copy of E.A. Wallis Budge’s The Liturgy of Funerary Offerings with Coburn’s occult bookplate.)
It wasn’t too long before the Stones decided to give up rats and sidestep into antiques. That didn’t last, it never does: the definition of an antique shop at the seaside is a necessary staging post in the process of gentrification, leading to an era of dolled-up, empty properties, ironic T-shirts and generic coffee outlets. A stationer called Quinlan (anticipating the name of the grotesque Orson Welles detective in Touch of Evil, the one who is told by Marlene Dietrich that his future is “all used up”) failed very quickly, handing over the deeds, in 1923, to a speculator in toys and fishing tackle. Next: a base for missionaries. Next: a ladies’ outfitter. After which the premises are split between a specialist in wardrobes (autopsy furniture) and the Hastings Radio and Television Company (transmitting to the dead).
At the dawn of the Sixties, the property played its trump card: used books. Mr J. Simmonds abandons wardrobes and chests of drawers for the shelf-fillers thrown in, as house clearance, for the same price. In 1965 he passes the enterprise on to Mr F. Moore, a retired civil servant, who, after deciding on the name Bookmans Halt, hung on until 1978. Within two years, the enterprising young Clive Linklater found his vocation. The business drifts on, after its own fashion, until 2016. The last of its kind. The book stacks offer encouragement to browsers, fanatics, schoolchildren and hard-bitten dealers (such as Driffield and Stone). Linklater should have been given a heritage grant and a preservation order. He didn’t really sell books; he rented them for a modest premium. He sorted the sh
elved items into approximate categories in something close to alphabetical order. He didn’t make a show of having a man already in place for anything asked of him. But he made no promises. He looked properly weary, but never in need of an ambulance. The news of the closure of Bookmans Halt will be remembered by faithful customers like the assassination of Kennedy. A dark day for Hastings. The tide washing wrecked libraries ashore now trickled into an infestation of charity shops and hopeless operations run by struck-off accountants and madmen who dread the idea of underpricing the meanest paperback.
For the first week of the closing sale, every item in the shop was on offer at £1 a time: elephant folios, leather-bound odd volumes, fat art books, military memoirs, movie star puffs, slip-cased Folio Society editions, first editions by unfashionable authors glued to the shelves since the day Clive opened. The second week the price was 50p. Then whatever was left was hauled away by optimists hoping to launch a shop of their own farther down the coast. Relieved of the burden of the eternal cycle of trade—buy, sell, buy, phone, beg, pray, sell—Clive had time to speak about his true passion: following the professional career, club to club, of Gareth Barry. Barry was a local boy from Hollington. He played football with Clive’s son. Now he was at Everton. Clive had been in the pub at lunchtime to watch the Toffees beating Chelsea 2–1. The former Manchester City international, in the twilight years of his stellar career, was buying up substantial tranches of property around Bohemia Road as an investment. It would close the circle very neatly if he ended up with Bookmans Halt in his portfolio.
A couple of weeks later, coming west down the Grand Parade, alongside the shell of the burnt-out pier, I met the revived Mr Linklater, strolling with his wife (never previously seen), and pushing a grandson in his buggy. It is often a shocking thing to encounter a bookshop troglodyte in the open air. But Clive was smiling, ruddy, burnished by pale winter sunshine. He was enjoying his new life. I was carrying a pair of fresh-caught plaice and a leaky bottle of fill-on-demand rosé in my bookshop bag. The wine merchant, recently down from London, featured a small collection of books for sale and an exhibition of works by Hastings notables like Aleister Crowley and Robert Tressell. But, after the closure of Bookmans Halt, I was in denial. I didn’t have the spirit to poke through lesser stock.
Taking my leave of Clive, I realized that my book bag, the biggest and strongest I owned, bore the stamp of Maggs Bros: “By Appointment to Her Majesty the Queen, Purveyors of Rare Books & Manuscripts”. An unnecessarily capacious receptacle, since I’d never bought so much as a pamphlet from the alarming Berkeley Square premises. Clive, when I was carrying off a dozen bargains, offered a thin blue Asian minimart carrier bag. By coincidence, the chill blast of economic realism was being felt, at exactly this moment, by Clive Linklater in Bohemia Road, St Leonards-on-Sea, and Ed Maggs, managing director of the most prestigious antiquarian operation in the land, in Berkeley Square, Mayfair.
At the time when I was first raiding Bookmans Halt to restock my Camden Passage stall, Ed Maggs was starting his apprenticeship in the family firm. He began humping boxes and typing invoices in 1980, the year that Linklater became his own boss. From time to time, Ed appeared at my Islington stall. He was as genial as Clive, with a not dissimilar backstory around music, playing in a band and acting as DJ in subterranean clubs. Founded by Uriah Maggs in 1853, and holding out in Berkeley Square, among the Rolls-Royce showrooms, the intimidating eighteenth-century property where the great antiquarian firm operated was just a fancy version of Bookmans Halt. Maggs Bros bought favoured items at auction for millions rather than snatching them away, as Clive was obliged to do, from the ring of Sussex cowboys for the price of a bottle of rotgut. Both buildings were haunted. The one in Mayfair by some wandering spectre from the days of stables and maidservants. And the one on Bohemia Road by the revenants of a lost life, the vanished bookmen and paper addicts.
As Bookmans Halt gave up the ghost, Maggs Bros startled the trade—it was like Westminster Abbey floating downstream in the night—by relocating to temporary premises, modest in scale, in Curzon Street. The gig was up. It felt as if books, like rat traps and Liberals, were a passing fad. Property, it appears, is an absolute. Occupations flourish and fade. It is the characters, the frustrated rock stars and authors of memoirs, who bring place to life. Who provide jobbing writers with their inspiration. Even if, as Ginsberg says, we have to publish in eternity.
My Homeland Is Storyland
ELIF SHAFAK
There is no place like Storyland for lonely children growing up in broken homes. I know, because I was one of them.
I was raised as a single child by a single mother at a time and in a land where this was quite unusual. It all started—from my point of view, that is—in Strasbourg. A small flat crammed with leftist-liberal Turkish students, cigarette smoke, revolutionary ideas, heated political discussions and lots of books. Shortly afterwards my parents went their separate ways. My father stayed in France to complete his doctorate in philosophy. My mother and I came to Turkey. Mum was too young, confused. She had no diploma since she had dropped out of university when she decided to get married. Love would be enough, she had thought. As a result, she now had no job, no money. Moreover, she was a “divorcee”—not a good word in The Advanced Dictionary of Patriarchy.
In this state we arrived in my maternal grandmother’s home in Ankara. In my memories this two-storey house changes all the time: sometimes it’s the colour of sour cherries; at other times, of salted plums or pickled beetroots. What does not change is the fact that it was located in a very conservative, patriarchal Muslim neighbourhood. Smells of fried aubergine, crushed garlic and scattered rosewater wafted from the open windows. Curious eyes blinked behind every curtain—watching, judging.
To my dismay, there were no bookshops in the vicinity. No libraries within sight. Later on, when we were invited to the neighbours’ houses I would notice that there were bookshelves in several of them, but usually these were meant for purposes other than holding books. Most of the cabinets in the “guest rooms” were decorated with porcelain kittens, sets of delicate tea glasses or gilded coffee cups. There were also a number of wedding photographs with absurd backgrounds of wild orchids and flying geese, the likes of which I had never seen before. But very few books.
That doesn’t mean, of course, there were no books. Every house had a copy of the Qur’an, for instance. And probably volumes of Hadiths (sayings of Prophet Muhammad) and Islamic prayers. I had realized, as a child, that people preferred to keep the holy book hanging on the wall inside a precious silk cover—untouchable, unreadable, aloof. But weren’t books meant to be read? Why was the holy book up there—above my height? beyond my reach? I would also learn, over the years, that I, as a girl, had to be twice as careful when approaching the Qur’an. I would not be able to touch it, for example, when I had my period. I would be regarded as “dirty” on those days.
It wasn’t a literary or intellectual environment, to say the least, the one I found myself in as a child. In the meantime, encouraged by Grandma, my mother had gone back to university to finish her degree. For a while, I called my mother abla—big sister—and I called Grandma, the woman who took care of me during those years, anne—mum. It was a bit confusing for everyone else, but somehow crystal clear to me.
Grandma was not a well-educated woman but she wholeheartedly believed that girls—even more than boys, she said—should get the best education. She was a healer. People with skin diseases, chronic fatigue or depression came to see her. She also cured the love-struck—those who were possessed by either love or madness, which Grandma said amounted to the same thing. Inside the house it was prayers and superstitions; rose thorns, red apples, evil eye beads, amber rosaries. Meanwhile, outside the house, there were bombs, gunshots and demonstrations. People died. People disappeared. In the late 1970s, just before the coup d’état, right wing was fighting against left wing, democrats were fighting against nationalists and Islamists, Kurds were taking up arms, an
d all of them were fighting among themselves. Political violence galloped.
Grandma was an amazing storyteller. She knew all the love stories by heart—Leila and Majnun; Farhad and Shirin; Kerem and Asli… They were the Romeos and Juliets of the Middle East. Her stories always began in the same way: “Once there was, once there wasn’t…” As soon as I heard this line, I knew I was entering a magical land, a topsy-turvy world where time ran in circles, animals danced and talked and preached, babies rocked their fathers’ cradles. Such was Grandma’s universe, full of myths, good-natured spells and supernatural creatures made of smokeless fire. They were called the djinn. If you could unveil their names, you could rule over them. Otherwise, they were more likely to command you. Life was very precarious.
On the shelf above the TV there was a thick, brown tome—The Big Book of Islamic Interpretation of Dreams. I was fascinated by it. What kind of a publication was this? It felt like a dictionary, but it wasn’t. It was structured like an encyclopedia, but it wasn’t that either. At times, it read like a short story or a poem, though clearly this was something else. Love is a puzzle. You don’t become besotted only with people, but also with printed works or abstract ideas. I certainly had a massive crush on this particular book.
Every dream was open to interpretation. Every interpretation could be reinterpreted depending on the intention and knowledge of the interpreter. The reader was less a passive consumer than an active contributor. The act of reading was not necessarily linear or logical. Unlike the books I had devoured before, this one had no beginning, no end. It was a labyrinth. I could start reading it in the middle, go backwards, skip pages, jump to and fro as though playing hopscotch with words.
At school, in the classroom, to my immense pleasure, I found a little cabinet full of books, most of them by Turkish authors. I finished them all quickly. Then, finding no other titles to borrow, I reread them, this time more slowly. But writing was an agony. By birth, I was left-handed. Our class teacher had made it very clear that this was a genetic mistake that needed to be corrected through discipline and perseverance. Everyone had to hold their pencils in their right hands.
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