Join us as we browse the shelves of our favourite fictional bookshops
Is there a better place to spend a quiet afternoon than browsing in a really lovely bookshop? One with an expansive fiction section but also some surprises: maybe a really good maps or travel corner or a shelf of cookery books that you can lose an hour in. Browsing in bookshops has been one of the things we have missed most during lockdown, so we’re pleased to see them beginning to open up.
This week is Independent Bookshops week and there are many ways to support your local emporium of words, from buying books from them online or over the phone to purchasing book tokens to be spent there in the future when browsing will hopefully be back to normal. In the meantime, we’ve been reminiscing about our favourite bookshops from books, TV and films. Here are a few we remember fondly…
Marks & Co
Located at the eponymous 84, Charing Cross Road, Marks & Co is a bit of an interloper in this list, as it wasn’t fictional at all. But it’s surely one of the most famous bookshops from a book ever to exist so we had to include it here. For those who haven’t yet read it (and it is a case of yet - you really must read it) the book is a collection of letters between the author, Helene Hanff, and the staff of Marks & Co, primarily Frank Doel. New Yorker Hanff wrote to the bookshop having heard they were specialists in out of print books, to ask for a number of titles she couldn’t get in the US. From there began a correspondence that spanned two decades. Sadly, by the time Helene made it to England the shop had just closed its doors for the final time, but the shop lives on in her book which was eventually published in 1971 and later became a film (starring Anthony Hopkins and Anne Bancroft) and a screenplay.
Black Books
This warm early noughties sit com, created by Dylan Moran and Graham Linehan, followed the lives of irascible bookshop owner Bernard Black, his assistant Manny and friend and neighbour Fran. The real star of the show, however, was the London bookshop itself. Infested with vermin and other creatures unknown, filthy to the extent of being unlivable, and languishing in a permanent fug of Bernard’s cigarette smoke and alcohol fumes, for some reason we all wanted to own Black Books, too. We’re still not sure why, but there it is.
The Travel Book Co
William Thacker’s (Hugh Grant’s) bookshop in the film Notting Hill was a charming emporium with the sort of romantic atmosphere that only comes with being in a beautiful building surrounded by enchanting tales from across the globe. So it’s no wonder American superstar Ann falls for the slightly bumbling English eccentric Will. We’d probably all be endlessly attractive if we all owned such as bookshop. The real-life location (142 Portobello Road) has actually never been a bookstore, but The Travel Book Co was based on the real-life Travel Bookshop nearby at 13 Blenheim Crescent.
Flourish and Blotts
No bookshop makes us want to go straight back to school more than Flourish & Blotts of Diagon Alley from the Harry Potter stories: ‘The shelves were packed to the ceiling with books as large as paving stones bound in leather, books the size of postage stamps covered in silk, books full of peculiar symbols and a few books with nothing in them at all…’ The owners are regularly confounded by titles such as The Invisible Book of Invisibility, which appears never to have turned up, and The Monster Book of Monsters, copies of which attack the manager and tear each other to pieces. Just magic.
