G Heywood Hill
Tucked away in Mayfair, G Heywood Hill is one of London’s finest bookshops, selling a wide selection of antiquarian, second-hand and new stock to cater for the avid reader’s every need.
Opened in 1936 by Heywood Hill and wife-to-be Anne, this bookshop is rich in literary history: Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell and Osbert Sitwell count amongst its former customers, and a visit reveals the shop has lost none of its charm.
A careful selection of new titles are flanked by rare first editions; attentive staff are on hand but let you browse uninterrupted; and book parcels destined for Chequers, lords and ladies, and loyal customers all over the world await delivery.
Loyalty is the key to Heywood Hill’s continuing success in a notoriously difficult marketplace and it has ever been the case. Its most famous employee, one Nancy Mitford, kept the shop running from 1943 to the end of the war and remained a devoted customer and friend of the Hills until her death in 1973. The witty and warm-hearted correspondence between Mitford and Heywood Hill is recorded in The Bookshop at 10 Curzon Street, a book edited by the shop’s manager John Saumarez Smith who recalls Heywood as ‘Gentle, delightful, vague, un-business-like.’
Hill’s correspondence with Mitford not only gives us an insight into her working life and her love of books, most movingly in the darkest hours just before her death, but also her wicked sense of humour and great affection for the shop and its owner. On receiving an account of a mix-up and one very disgruntled customer, Mitford responds: ‘Oh, Heywood, I’m weak with screaming at your letter’. Many letters contain requests for books, and on one occasion shock at the amount of books she had ordered: ‘Oh dear […] Thirty parcels of books including a huge one from you I haven’t the courage to open!’
Saumarez Smith describes his job as manager as ‘A lifetime of advising customers on every subject under the bookish sun,’ and identifies the qualities which set independents apart from their large chain rivals as ‘experience, knowledge, and a breadth of reading [by the staff] that is unlikely to be found in the chains. Buying books should be a thoroughly enjoyable experience.’
He recalls that in times past ‘nearly all customers were friends, or became friends. They all had accounts, and treated the shop as a sort of clubhouse.’ And Heywood Hill is still based on the support of those who can and want to help: ‘The Duke of Devonshire is the majority shareholder. Other shareholders are friends of mine and the shop who wanted to support and sustain it.’
Like most independent booksellers he is worried about the industry sacrificing quality and interest for bulk sales, and calls the success of the The Da Vinci Code ‘deeply depressing’. Asked what he suggests independents can do to fight back he replies, ‘If independent booksellers were less busy, they should get together and present a coherent front on the subject of discounts etc, to publishers. Easier said than done.’
The same could be said for keeping an independent bookshop in business for seventy years, but Heywood Hill is testament to the fact that knowledge, and a love of books and bookselling can keep customers returning for decades.
G Heywood Hill, 10 Curzon Street, W1J 5HH; www.heywoodhill.com
The Bookshop at 10 Curzon Street – Letters between Nancy Mitford and Heywood Hill 1952 – 73, ed. John Saumarez Smith (Frances Lincoln 2004)
