Category Archives: comfort

The art of threading a book

In his tribute to the art of reading, the author and former Director of the National Library of Argentina, Alberto Manguel, declares, ‘We are what we read’. He does so in response to Walt Whitman’s assertion that the process of reading is merely an intellectual one. Manguel contends that unconsciously, the reader and text become intertwined.

Researchers at the Washington University Dynamic Cognition Laboratory in St Louis, Missouri, would concur with Manguel. They found that deep reading creates a sort of virtual reality, as the reader constructs a mental simulation of the narrative as they read. For example, if a character in the book someone is reading pulls a light cord, activity in the reader’s brain increases in the frontal lobe region which controls grasping motions.

In essence therefore, the reader becomes the book.

‘Deep’ (or slow) reading is, I assume, a more meditative activity than say, rapid reading. My blog post on How to remedy excessive daydreaming and get writing explores the latter, citing Geoffrey A. Dudley, B.A. on the benefits of ‘Rapid Reading’ (1964)

Dudley wrote several self-improvement books from the late 1950s to the mid ’90s, and while he never told us to go deep, he did tell us that in order to read faster, we must first learn to concentrate.

Concentration is surely required for all reading, fast or slow, is it not?

In ‘Jake the Dog’, a charming story by the author Norah C. James (whose first novel was banned in Britain in 1929), narrated from the dog’s point of view, we find Jake observing his owner, ‘holding a stiff, flat thing in front of her face and staring at it. It was a queer thing to do, he thought’.

In our attempt to concentrate, to eliminate distraction and sustain our attention upon that ‘stiff flat thing’, we must consciously remove ourselves to another place, generally a place of repose. We need to go, ‘off the grid’ as Will Schwalbe stipulates in, ‘Books for Living: a Reader’s Guide to Life’, (2016).We can’t interrupt books he says, we can only interrupt ourselves while reading them.

Doing just that and totally immersing ourselves in the act of reading may be more difficult for some. Leonard Lowe, who had contracted Encephalitis Lethargica (sleeping sickness) at the age of eleven in 1921, was an avid reader.

Leonard Lowe

Leonard’s life history is featured in Oliver Sacks’ medical memoir, ‘Awakenings’ (1973). Speechless and without voluntary motion (except for minute movements of one hand), Leonard became the hospital librarian and composed monthly book reviews for the hospital magazine. In 1969, the neurologist Oliver Sacks administered a new ‘wonder drug’, L-DOPA (also known as levodopa and levodihydroxyphenylalanine), and as a consequence, Leonard’s reading became more difficult than ever – Sacks tells us how the drug’s adverse side effects compelled Leonard to read faster and faster, without regard for the sense or syntax. He would have to shut the book with a snap after each sentence or paragraph, so he could digest its sense before rushing ahead.

Leonard Lowe’s story is incredibly moving. Sacks writes that Leonard, along with his other patients, taught him what it means to be a human being who survives, and fully, in the face of such affliction and terrible odds. (Leonard is played by Robert De Niro in the 1990 movie, Awakenings.)

Miriam H., another patient treated by Sacks, had a strange intermittent compulsion to count, described as a form of arithmomania that signalled her need to order, disorder and reorder. She read omnivorously with great speed and intentness. Using her eidetic or photographic memory, Miriam could remember the exact number of words counted on every page. She could read AND count at the same time.

Sacks’ account is heart wrenching. The social scientist and bioethicist Tom Shakespeare once described Sacks as the man who mistook his patients for a literary career (echoing Sacks’ most famous title, ‘The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat’), but I’m grateful for the opportunity to learn from Sacks’ writing.

I’m often reminded at book club sessions that our encounters with books and our simulated realities are altogether unique. I enjoy the Louth U3A Reading Group sessions, and I’m grateful to Amanda Watts who organises and facilitates the new Louth Book Club which meets at The Priory. At these convivial sessions we acknowledge our different perspectives by agreeing to disagree and we come away enriched by the communal act of reflection.

David Ulin in, ‘The Lost Art of Reading: WHY BOOKS MATTER IN A DISTRACTED TIME’ (2010), tells us that as ‘deep’ readers, we’re asked to ‘slip inside’ a text. Ulin contrasts deep or meditative reading with, for example, our propensity these days to skim the surface of each subject as we fail to concentrate, to pursue a line of thought or tolerate a conflicting point of view (whatever that view may be – another topic for another day).

Books and labyrinths

Reading a book is never a passive experience – for any of us – and the same may be said for threading a labyrinth, however we may choose to engage with it. A labyrinth may be encountered in many different ways; contemplated, traced, drawn, painted, carved, planted, sewn, worn, walked, and danced. And our experience is often transformative.

Charlotte Higgins, in her intriguing exploration of the idea of the labyrinth, ‘Red Thread: On Mazes & Labyrinths’ (2018), tells that on entering a labyrinth, humans, ‘spin thread, they tell stories, they build structures … there is meaning to be made, meaning to be excavated.’

Like reading, the labyrinth experience and the meaning it creates is different for every person. I’m reminded of Dr Margaret Rainbird who took a year-long “Labyrinths for Life” world tour in 2017 and describes labyrinths as being a bit like people. She says,

“There are some that I feel an immediate emotional connection with and others where there is no chemistry at all.”

Higgins refers to writers of the Middle Ages who speculated upon the etymology for the Latin for labyrinth, connecting the word, ‘laborintus’ with the phrase, ‘labor intus’, meaning ‘labour inside’. She says the labyrinth became a proxy for the labour of life, ‘the work of knowing the self; and the struggle to read the labyrinth of the world.’

Higgins also quotes her recent correspondence with a Mrs Sofia Grammatiki, who had many years earlier guided Higgins and her parents around the museum at Heraklion, near Knossos on the island of Crete during a family holiday. Mrs Grammatiki views the labyrinth as a symbol of the imagination, representing the manner in which humans make associations. She says that stories have this comfort in them; they have a beginning and an end. They find a way out of the labyrinth.

(I wonder if Mrs Grammatiki ever read Italo Calvino’s labyrinthine tale, ‘If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller’ (1980), and if so, what she made of it. I suspect she’d give it the thumbs down, like most of my book club friends. Personally, I loved it.)

Having reflected on the comfort of books and things in my post on Finding Comfort in Still Life last year, I can see what Mrs Grammatiki is getting at, although I do appreciate that reading may at times be uncomfortable. And that is not a bad thing. It does us good to be challenged, as I found recently with David Jarrett’s profound memoir, ’33 Meditations on Death: Notes from the Wrong end of Medicine’ (2021). While the book is life affirming in many ways, I did find his unflinching chapter on, ‘Dying á la Mode’ brutal and tender in equal measures.

Books, labyrinths, and life, let’s step in and see where the path takes us.

Bookshops come and go

Do you have fond memories of brilliant bookshops that have sadly disappeared?

The Louth & District Hospice Charity Bookshop ceased trading on 31st May 2022

On 9th June 2022, Professor Sam Rayner’s fascinating inaugural UCL lecture, ‘Hidden in the bookshelves: Una Dillon and the ‘formidable’ women booksellers of London, 1930s-1960s’, featured several iconic London establishments, a few of which are still with us, most owned by Waterstones. You can watch her lecture on YouTube.

Growing up In Cambridge, we were spoilt for choice.

William Heffer, William Heffer,
Bowes and Bowes, Bowes and Bowes,
Galloway and Porter, Galloway and Porter,
Deighton Bell, Deighton Bell

This rhyme, sung to the tune of Frère Jacques, harks back to a golden age of bookselling in twentieth-century Cambridge, when the city was served by several excellent establishments, each with its own distinctive history and character.

Fifty years ago, our family Saturday morning routine included a visit to the new Heffers Children’s Bookshop, where I would spend all my pocket money on a paperback, often a Puffin or Green Knight imprint at two shillings and sixpence, or from 1971, twenty-five or thirty new pence. Every visit to Heffers was an immersive bookish experience, enhanced by the ambiance of the shop and the people you would find there.

The antiquated shop front of the Children’s Bookshop in those early days disguised the ultra-modern interior, with its turquoise carpet, low sky-blue ceiling, orange staircase lined with mirrors and plastic moulded pea-green tubs for sitting or standing on. Transcended by books in these psychedelic surroundings, seeking my good read for the week, I would now and again glimpse the carnival of stories, and of my mind, all reflected in a large distorting mirror at the top of the stairs.

Interior, Heffer’s Children’s Bookshop 1969

I can also remember the old Heffers bookshop in Petty Cury, with its bottle glass bow windows, polished wooden floors, towering bookshelves, and grand balcony.

Heffer’s Petty Cury Bookshop

For many years, this iconic bookshop was divided into several departments, all crammed with stock, as described in an early twentieth century brochure,

‘Visitors to this, our Book Shop, constantly remark to us: “How do you find your Books?” “How do you know what you have got?” The questions are not unwarranted, for, though the exterior of the shop is small, the interior – consisting of four floors each 40 feet in depth – is the reverse, and with every available space shelved and crowded with Books: with Books in portentous stacks invading the floors, the questions are very pertinent.’

In the 1960s, we would visit my great-auntie Winnie at this bookshop, where she worked as secretary to the renowned bookseller, Mr Frank Stoakley. I would sit patiently on the library steps in the dusky Antiquarian Book Department, inhaling the sweet vanilla and almond aroma of old books, as mother chatted to auntie.

My family clocked up one hundred and twenty years of service for Heffers, starting with great-grandfather Frederick Anstee, employed as an errand boy by William Heffer in 1896, when he opened the Petty Cury shop. Frederick’s two daughters, Lilian (my grandmother) and Winifred (great-auntie Winnie), also worked for the firm. We do not know the exact circumstances in which Frederick was taken on, but in a 1952 biography of his father, William, Sidney Heffer wrote, ‘The increase in the business necessitated employing an errand boy. One lad was anything but a bright specimen–practically uneducated and from a miserable home.’ That lad was Frederick.

William undertook to educate Frederick, insisting he write in a copy book and work out simple sums each night, bringing the results to work the next morning. Frederick thrived by this ‘strange tuition’, and eventually became head of the Science Department at the Petty Cury bookshop.

Amongst great-auntie Winnie’s papers is this portrait of an earnest boy with tight curls, sporting a smart knitted buttoned-up suit, captured at Ralph Starr’s photographic studio in Fitzroy Street, Cambridge. It was taken in 1892 and the boy is Frederick, aged nine years. At the time, his future benefactors were still living above the shop, just a few doors up from the studio. It is likely that the Heffer family arranged and paid for this portrait, as Frederick’s mother, a ‘Barnwell Lady’, would not have had the funds or indeed, the wherewithal, to do so.

In 2015, I combined my love of the past and of books, by researching and writing a history of Heffers. It was a project close to my heart. There were many quiet moments when I thought about Frederick and the other family members who had worked for the firm. It may sound whimsical, but I sensed their approval of the legacy I was trying to create, and it gave me an inner confidence. It was, and still is, a nice feeling.

Published Oct 2016

’This Book is About Heffers’, won a Cambridgeshire Association for Local History Award, and I’ve given dozens of illustrated talks on the topic to a wide range of groups and societies, and to students. I enjoy meeting people and hearing about their own memories of the firm, so many interesting stories. Sometimes I had repeat visits. An elderly gentleman who had long since retired from Heffers Printers, attended two talks and in tears, expressed his gratitude for my book that had prompted many precious memories. Two ladies who had together attended a Heffers talk, then came to one of my history of mazes talks. My husband, Trevor, went to introduce me to them as they arrived and they exclaimed there was no need, as not only had they already met Julie Bounford, but they had also brought some Heffers memorabilia I might like to keep.

I was especially pleased to meet people who had worked with members of my family. At one talk, a lady took out her album to show me snaps of her Heffers friends and colleagues. Inside was a photograph of her standing with great-auntie Winnie on the balcony at the front of the Sidney Street shop in Cambridge. The Heffers book is dedicated to auntie.

Winifred Anstee at the Petty Cury bookshop, with Frank Stoakley and bookselling colleagues.

When bookshops close

In September 1970, Heffers relocated the Petty Cury bookshop to new premises at 20 Trinity Street, Cambridge, where they remain to this day. While retaining the historic Georgian façade above ground level, the architects designed a wide shopfront in bronze and plate glass for the new premises, providing a, ‘simple and elegant showcase onto the street’, and internally, everything was altered in a radical new concept in bookshop design.

Lord Butler, Master of Trinity College, who officially opened the new bookshop, described the design as ingenious and attractive, combining great spaciousness with a, “superabundance of cosy private nooks where book lovers can tuck themselves away for hours on end perusing their favourite volumes”.

Trinity Street bookshop

The movement of stock from Petty Cury to Trinity Street was a major operation, carried out by the removal firm Bullens. It took six and a half days, night and day, to transfer more than 80,000 books.

Reuben Heffer, grandson of William and a third generation Heffers director, welcomed the closure of the Petty Cury bookshop, stating at the time that the shop had become almost unworkable, “it was so Dickensian”, he said. But that was what we loved about it.

Despite the generally positive reception amongst staff and customers, the new premises at Trinity Street did not suit everyone. Many employees and customers remember Petty Cury as a more intimate shop. Claire Brown, who had also worked at Blackwell’s in Oxford, was particularly sorry to swap Petty Cury’s polished oak for carpets and chrome,

“It was a great pity that Heffers didn’t adopt the sensible Blackwell’s policy, which was, and is, to keep it looking exactly as it did in the nineteenth century. Heffers, when it left Petty Cury, in the passionate urge to be new and up to date … What Cambridge and Oxford had to sell was the past. The fact that there is a modern business going on is beside the point … They did lose a lot when they left the Petty Cury.”

Opinion was clearly divided and many Cambridge folk still miss that old Dickensian bookshop.

Loss of the Louth charity bookshop

After moving to Louth in Lincolnshire, I took up a volunteering opportunity, as bookselling assistant at the Louth & District Hospice Charity Bookshop. My previous retail experience had been limited and I’ve never been a natural salesman. As a young teenager, I had had a Saturday job at a greengrocer in Akeman Street, Cambridge, standing around in the freezing cold, serving customers and lugging sacks of potatoes for a heavily made-up shop keeper who spent much of the time buffing her nails in the back room. And so, in my application for this role I emphasised instead my love of books and bookshops, and an interest in the history of bookselling informed by my family history.

From February 2022, my regular shift at the Louth bookshop was half a day a week, although, along with some of the other volunteers, from mid-May I helped to cover the manager’s shifts while he volunteered elsewhere on the Polish border, assisting those displaced by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Our volunteer manager was still away when we received news of the bookshop’s imminent closure on 31st May. With just a few days’ notice, we managed to notify many loyal customers, and we held a closing down sale.

Those last few days were distressing for all concerned. Especially those volunteers who had given much of their time over several years to the bookshop and the charity. As a relatively recent contributor, my emotional investment in this enterprise did not compare.

In her inaugural lecture, Sam Raynor declared that Una Dillon did for UCL, what Heffers and Blackwell’s did for Cambridge and Oxford, in establishing a flagship ‘campus’ bookshop. Dillon’s, Heffers, and Blackwell’s (owners of Heffers since 1999), have all been acquired by Waterstones. Of course, our little second-hand charity bookshop in Louth was never going to be of interest to the big W.

I understand what Ernest Heffer (son of William) meant when, in his 1933 address to young booksellers, he declared that a bookshop is a ‘microcosm of everything of importance which is happening in the world’. Although more recently, when I see our world going to hell in a handcart, a bookshop is my means of escape.

As I observed the anguish and chaos in the Louth & District Hospice Charity bookshop on that last day of trading, I felt bereft. It’s true that bookshops are close to the heart of our communities, and long may they remain so.

I never imagined that I would ever take part in closing one down.

Finding comfort in Still Life

The singer Peg Temper, in Sarah Winman’s beautifully crafted novel ‘Still Life’, sang for her life, and for yours too, ‘Because the world never turned out the way you wanted it to. It simply turned. And you hung on.’

Are you hanging on?

I hope so.

This evocative novel may well be just what the doctor ordered for these troubled times. If you’re fortunate enough to be reading it in a safe and secure space, then I hope that you will, like me, appreciate the privilege of being able to lose yourself in Winman’s intimate and, at times, comedic and uplifting tale of friendship and love.

I’m reminded of a 1939 Heffers of Cambridge advertisement featured in my history of the famous Cambridge bookseller, ‘This Book is about Heffers’ (2016).

At the time The Cambridge Review Commentator wrote,

‘Fortunately, most of us still preserve sufficient presence of mind to be able occasionally to leave war-thoughts behind and turn to our bookshelves. At the bookshops War and Peace has been in great demand from those “who have always been meaning to tackle it and have never before found the time.” At such period as this there is comfort in length. One desires a really substantial world into which to escape.’

‘Still Life’ is set mostly in quintessential post-war Florence. There’s art history and an appearance by the young Morgan Forster and his mother, to boot.

Morgan with his mother, Lily, in the late 1920s (image featured in Nicola Beauman’s 1993 biography of EM Forster).

A minor insurrection

And now? We find ourselves at perhaps the most dangerous moment in history since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. It’s a worrying time.

I may have been born the year before that frightening episode, but my upbringing was strictly non-political, to such an extent that mother and father strongly expressed their concern about me becoming ‘politicised’ when I attended university in 1980.

Having joined Women’s Aid and CND as an undergraduate, I finally found the courage of my convictions and became a full-time volunteer for the Cambridge Women’s Refuge; still unapproved and despite being told I’d be disowned if I became a social worker. Then, as a postgraduate student in Sheffield, I was an active supporter of the Miner’s Strike, which infuriated mother who accused me and my ‘miner friends’ of blowing up Margaret Thatcher and her colleagues at the Grand Hotel in Brighton in 1984.

The need for parental approval remains strong and in 2019, aged 58, when joining an Extinction Rebellion protest at a petrol station near my parents’ home, I was very apprehensive about the possibility of being spotted by father.

Earlier this month, at a Louth U3a book club session, we got onto the topic of protesting, and I was delighted to hear that my new friends had been involved in various protests over the decades, including the movement against the Vietnam War, and against the incarceration of Nelson Mandela in South Africa. We also talked about the 1984/5 Miner’s Strike, swapping stories of the impact of its policing, and the decimation of mining communities.

When I arrived home after that session, I picked up an email from the parents confirming their forthcoming trip to celebrate their diamond wedding anniversary. A stay at the Grand Hotel in Brighton.

Comfort in books and things

A more affirming aspect of my childhood was our weekly visit to Heffers Children’s Bookshop, and to the Central Library, then located upstairs at the Guildhall in Cambridge.

The writer Simone de Beauvoir viewed books – all books – as the most precious things in the world and dreamed of shutting herself away in the dusty avenues of her local circulating library. I like to think that de Beauvoir would have appreciated the way in which the Italian writer, Italo Calvino described the massing of written pages that can bind a room like the thickness of foliage in a dense wood, like stratifications of rock, slabs of slate, slivers of schist. When I look at my collection of biographies, I see reassuring layers of wisdom.

It isn’t just books, though. There is comfort to be found in all material things, as Daniel Miller discovered in his 2008 anthropological study of human values, feelings and experiences; a study that explores ways in which material culture helps people to deal with loss and change, and how the humanity of people is revealed by their material possessions. Miller observes in ‘The Comfort of Things’ that material objects are an integral and inseparable aspect of all relationships. He affirms the centrality of relationships to modern life, and the centrality of material culture to relationships.

The fabric of our lives is inter-woven with everyday objects. Miller cites the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s argument that our orientation to everyday objects is one of the main reasons why we accept as natural and unchallenged, the routines and expectations of life.

With her Bruegel-esque narrative, Sarah Winman gives us in ‘Still Life’ what Virginia Woolf would describe as a tale filled with, ‘people going about their daily affairs, toiling, failing, succeeding, eating, hating, loving, until they die’. For Winman, the power of still life lies precisely in triviality, in a world of reliability that is symbolised by objects representing ordinary life,

‘Within these forms something powerful is retained: continuity. Memory. Family.’

Cultural devotion and destruction

Unlike Miller and Bourdieu, I’m not attempting a rigorous science of society. While it was a pleasure to revisit my own copy of Bourdieu’s masterpiece, ‘The Rules of Art’ (1996 translation), I’m simply musing upon what Miller describes as the social cosmology that helps to determine the order of those things that shape my miniscule but holistic world. For example, when helping out this week at the Louth & District Hospice Charity Bookshop in what is now my hometown, I realised what the physical presence of books means to me. How vital they are to my existence. I venerate them.

But what if your bookshops, libraries – and homes – are being blown to pieces?

As he observed the terrible destruction of Ukrainian cities by Russian forces, Nick Poole, Chief Executive of the Chartered Institute of Library & Information Professionals, wrote a piece on protecting libraries and archives in Ukraine,

‘You disrupt and destabilise a people by disrupting their sense of self – their language, their literature, their culture.’

We know that war can destroy culture.

It’s an appalling tragedy. Hopefully, when the fighting finally stops, the Ukrainian people (those who have survived) can reclaim their homeland. And hopefully, they will, like the Italians in Sarah Winman’s magnificent novel, be able to recover many of those precious antiquities and books that define their humanity. For, as the art historian Evelyn Skinner in ‘Still Life’ declares,

‘Art versus humanity is not the question … One doesn’t exist without the other.’