Welcome to the penultimate edition of my series of posts about the shops we're visiting on the London Bookshop Crawl! This is a bit of a cheat really, since there are seven bookshops in Cecil Court, but as none of them are huge and we will be visiting them as one stop on the crawl I thought I'd post a little bit about all of them here!
In case you've not been before, Cecil Court is a pedestrianised street between Charing Cross Road and St Martin's Lane. All the shops have Victorian fronts and hanging signs and a lot of them sell rare or antiquarian books.
Tenderbooks
Mainly focusing on art books, they have monthly exhibitions focused on a particular artist or press as well as regular launches and events.
Marchpane
I'm the most excited to visit this shop as it specialises in children's and illustrated books from the 1800s to the present day. As the name implies, their real specialism is Lewis Carroll and so they have many and various editions of the Alice books as well as Carroll's other works and some Alice ephemera.
Travis and Emery Music Bookshop
This is Rhys' favourite shop down this road as it sells out of print, second hand and antiquarian sheet music and books about music.
Peter Ellis
Antiquarian booksellers stocking mostly first editions over a range of genres.
Watkins Books
Describing itself as an esoteric bookshop, Watkins also publishes books in the spiritual and new science genres. They also have a quarterly magazine and host regular events.
Goldsboro Books
Goldsboro aims to provide its customers with signed first editions. It was founded in 1999 and is impressively dedicated to bringing brilliant, special and often exclusive signed books to its customers. They have a Book of the Month Club, where you sign up and are sent a signed book that they think is great and has the possibility of becoming collectible each month. Many of them are exclusive to Goldsboro, and although due to the nature of what they sell it's not the cheapest, not all of the books are really expensive (signed and numbered edition of Haniya Yanagihara's A Little Life for £199.99, anyone? Probably not on this trip!). It looks like a lovely shop.
Erica's review
Stephen Poole Fine Books
Specialist in 20th Century literature, this shop has separate sections for Crime fiction and books shortlisted for literary awards as well as some signed copies.
Although I've browsed in Cecil Court before (usually killing time while Rhys went through sheet music in Travis and Emery) I've not really spent any amount of time in any of these shops. As you'll see, I've linked to Erica's review of Goldsboro Books above as she has actually been to it, and I'm hopeful that it'll be a fun stop on our crawl!
I didn't realise there were so many bookshops in Cecil Court. I've peeped in Marchpane once or twice in search of Chalet School books I didn't own (though these are collectors editions nowadays and pretty pricey) and I was aware of the new-agey one, though that's not really my cup of tea, but I haven't explored the whole area, so that'll be exciting!
ReplyDeleteLess than a week to go now. Eeeeeek!