A Spy In The Bookshop: Letters Between Heywood Hill and John Saumerez Smith 1965-74

The background of the letters, mostly Saumarez Smith's to Heywood, is given in the other review. The tone of them is that of two petty and petulant schoolchildren. Mollie Buchanan if JSS is accurate does sound rather dreadul but was in the bookshop only two days a week and her husband seems, if a bit self-important, on the whole inoffensive.

The letters from JSS are almost wholly flat complaints about those two. Heywood concurs with them and he and his 'spy' give sappy childish nicknames to the Buchanans, rail about their behaviour, try to suss out who's on their side and who on the others' and build a clubhouse in the back garden to which only enemies of the Buchanans are allowed entry. I made that last bit up, actually, but it's in show more keeping with the spirit of the book.

The Buchanans left the shop altogether within a few years of the last letter here, written in 1974, and the book was published in 2006, decades later. To me this is extraordinary: To keep a pet simmering for three decades seems a terrible waste of one's given time. And Saumarez Smith is so obviously devoid of insight into himself that he might welll have thought the perfectly ordinary letters were remarkable enough to merit publishing though more likely his motive was that of an adult returning to his childhood clubhouse still seething over the old slights and shouting out from within it Nyah nyah nyah!

Entertaining because the enduring petty bitterness is so markedly OTT and because of the wholly unwitting way in which the author outs himself as, er, an enduringly petty & bitter sort of person. show less

This is marvelous accompaniment to The Bookshop at 10 Curzon street, which I read, and sent on a little ring recently. Between 1966 and 1974 John Saumarez Smith working at the famous Heywood Hill shop, corresponds with Heywood Hill. Much of the correspondence concerned what became known as "the row in the bookshop". Handasyde (Handy) and Mollie Buchanan who also worked in the shop (Handy had been HH's partner) were not on good terms (to put it mildly) with Heywood Hill, and so after his retirement he enjoyed hearing about their vile antics from John. The result is an often hilarious book, they really were unbelievably poisonous. There are dozens of people mentioned who to be frank I had never heard of - and the footnotes don't do show more anything but tell the reader, the person's profession or family connections - but that doesn't matter. The book is still readable, and finishes off beautifully what was started with The bookshop at 10 Curzon Street. I didn't find it quite as marvelously charming as the first book was, but an interesting read nevertheless. show less