Just the one Jarndyce

There are two stimuli to this post: firstly, I am reading Dickens' Hard Times, for the first time since studying it for 'A' level; secondly, I heard last year that another splendid antiquarian bookshop has closed - Colin Page in Brighton (with its wonderful 'batcave' in the back yard, where I found and bought the six Folio Society volumes of Trollope's Barchester series for £24.00)). Oh for the time when one could spend a day, not just in Hay-on-Wye, but in Bath, Edinburgh or York, going from one Aladdin's Cave to another. Those were the days of Driff's self-published, and very successful, guide to All The Secondhand and Antiquarian Bookshops in Britain. Witty, with a huge dollop of sarcasm, there were at least five editions, dated 1984, 1987, 1991, 1992 and 1995. For a while, it became my pocket 'Bible'. Now, what the Internet did not destroy, pernicious Business Rates have virtually finished. It means that one has to frequent PBFA and ABA book fairs, where one often feels like a scavenger at stalls rather than a privileged and valued customer, even a 'friend'.

Thank goodness for Cecil Court and Charing Cross Road and, yes, much of Hay-on-Wye - and for the last bastians (fortalices?!) in York, Eastbourne (dear Camilla with her pink plastic bags) and Edinburgh; and, above all for Jarndyce, since 1969 selling books and publishing catalogues (they are treasured on a bookshelf here) on 18th and 19th century English Literature and History. They have furnished me with some wonderful hours of reading material: in the last few years I have purchased from them

Major Michel's Trevor Hastings (1842); Lady Georgiana Fullerton's A Stormy Life (Tauchnitz ed. 1867); Rev. Francis Paget's Milford Malvoisin (2nd. ed. 1842); Emily Holt's At Ye Grene Griffin (1882); Charlotte Yonge's Two Penniless Princesses (1891); Rev. Morgan's Raymond de Monthault (1853); Miss Sandham's The History of Elizabeth Woodville (1822); Susan Ferrier's Marriage (2nd. ed. 1819).

Great Russell Street may well hold the British Museum; but I turn right more often than I do left, when I approach from Tottenham Court Road.

London it is, then, in early March. Meanwhile, back to finishing Hard Times.