Fisher & Sperr
Anna Goodall tangles with literary ghosts at one of north London's finest second-hand bookshops
As you step out of the bustle of Highgate High Street and into Fisher & Sperr a loud bell rings and John Sperr looks up from his post at the back of the bookshop where he has worked for the last sixty years. You can imagine a scene from a Dickens novel unfolding in this warren of a shop. Spreading over four floors the building is crammed from floor to ceiling with antiquarian and second-hand books. Master of this bibliophile kingdom, Sperr has been in the bookselling trade since he started at Zwemmers, on Charing Cross Road at the age of fifteen.
He invites me to take a look around and so, ascending the winding flights of stairs, taking care not to bump my head and inhaling that distinctive print and paper smell, I glimpse what is clearly only a tiny selection of the massive range of books on offer, from a beautiful early nineteenth-century edition of Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey and a sumptuous book of Dufy prints, to those curious ‘sets’ with intriguingly non-specific titles like Painting in England in Five Volumes or Work of the Brontes. Sperr has a special interest in books about London and claims to have well over 1,000 of them.
On my return from the tour Sperr cheerfully enquires if I felt strange in the very top room. Apparently it is haunted and not only does he find rubble at the top of the stairs on a regular basis, but visitors often report feeling strange up there. He discovered one customer rooted to the spot, sweating profusely. (Actually, looking back on my notes I found I had written ‘weird feeling, odd noises’. Obviously the ghost up there didn’t want me to purchase James Bridie’s Tedious and Brief that I was perusing up there.)
Inevitably, a place like Fisher & Sperr attracts writers and it boasts several famous authors as customers. Graham Greene and JB Priestley were frequent visitors, as was local writer John Betjeman who Sperr tells me loved the place. Betjeman recommended that in a bookshop you should ‘always get down on the floor’ to look at the lower shelves as that was where the most interesting books were lurking.
One of the Sperr’s most treasured possessions is a complete edition of Encyclopédie, the eighteenth-century French Enlightenment work that the authorities commissioned and then tried to suppress. It is made up of thirty-five volumes, a third or so of which contain illustrative copper plates (thus explaining why so many sets are incomplete, as the copper was taken out and reused). What is wonderful about the shop is that while it houses rare tomes like these which draw people from all over the world, it is also easy for the interested but essentially ignorant to find affordable second-hand gems: I found a gorgeous Everyman edition of Byron’s letters from 1948.
Dispiritingly Sperr predicts that in twenty years’ time there will be no bookshops, noting how many knowledgeable booksellers have taken to working from the internet where rare books can be easily sourced and their extensive knowledge tapped into with no overhead costs. I only hope that he’s got it wrong on this one bookselling point. Forget the internet, I recommend a visit.
Fisher & Sperr
46 Highgate High Street
London N6 5JB
