John Saumarez Smith at 65
James Fergusson
‘Might it amuse you to see (and perhaps even buy) Gibbon’s spectacles?’ John Saumarez Smith made Bevis Hillier a once-in-a-lifetime offer. It was 1976 and Hillier dithered. He neither saw nor bought Gibbon’s spectacles, but he did make a Saturday column out of it for the Times — characterising Saumarez Smith as ‘perhaps the most knowledgeable of the younger generation of London booksellers’. Saumarez Smith, then 33, had been running Heywood Hill’s bookshop in Curzon Street for two years, having joined it in 1965 straight from Cambridge. Now, as his 65th birthday turns, and after purveying knowledge and amusement to Heywood Hill’s worldwide clientele for more than four decades, he is standing down as managing director. It is an unusual record of service in any occupation.
First there was Heywood Hill, who founded the shop in 1936 (Saumarez Smith started the Monday after he left). He created the atmosphere, set the scene, enlisted his friends as customers, a fertile mix of writers, artists and gentry. While he was away during the war, Nancy Mitford took his place. At the best and busiest times, said Hill, the shop was ‘like an eight-hour cocktail party without any drink’.
Then there was Handasyde Buchanan, who joined in 1945, and used to claim that he was Heywood Hill. A better bookseller than he was manager, he nursed, complained Evelyn Waugh, ‘the concealed malice of the underdog’. He ran the shop after Hill left, while his wife Mollie, a shop veteran from 1943, concealed her malice less effectively. The knockabout of shop life is recalled in The Bookshop at 10 Curzon Street (2004), Saumarez Smith’s selection of letters between Nancy Mitford and Heywood Hill, 1952-73, and in its more bruising sequel, A Spy in the Bookshop (2006), letters between Hill and Saumarez Smith, 1966-74.
The ‘spy’ was John Saumarez Smith, so dubbed by Nancy Mitford. ‘Handy’ Buchanan and Heywood Hill had fallen out over the sale of the shop in 1965. Hill, nominally with a consultant role, dared not visit, and relied for news on Saumarez Smith’s bulletins. Buchanan suspected their collusion, and in any case resented the intruder. ‘The trouble is,’ he told Saumarez Smith in 1969, ‘and you probably don’t realise this yourself, that you correct us all as if you were a headmaster, that your tone of voice becomes almost canonical.’ There is something headmasterly about Saumarez Smith. He has a Wykehamical ease; if he doesn’t know everything, he seems to know everybody. If there is something canonical, it is hardly surprising. His father was Appointments Secretary to the Archbishops of Canterbury and York; three generations of Smiths before that were all in holy orders — his great-grandfather was the Primate of Australia. His maternal grandfather was the theologian Canon Charles Raven, while the Primate’s grandfather, in more worldly mode, was Joseph Smith, William Pitt’s emollient private secretary. Saumarez Smith inherited Cambridge cleverness, ‘Joe’ Smith’s diplomacy and a powerful streak of evangelism. He speaks with authority, sees his business as to spread the word: his duty is to his customers, to find out what they like and to predict and provide.
Word of mouth is the one form of marketing publishers can’t, and would like to, control — but good booksellers can. This is bookselling as party-giving (eight hours without drink): making introductions between writers and readers. 10 Curzon Street is a small but theatrical space, like an overcrowded drawing room. Old books sit beside new, calfbound architectural folios beside 21st-century gardening books, first editions of Henry James next to the new Sebastian Faulks. All bookshops were once like this, but few survive. New customers can be baffled, but are more likely to be drawn in by the possibilities. If you liked this book, why not try that one? Amazon will make similar suggestions, but Amazon’s advice is impersonally arithmetical (other buyers did this . . .) whereas Heywood Hill’s staff will actually have read the books.
Saumarez Smith himself reads some 50 books a year. He is an impatient reader. If he is not gripped after 50 pages, he gives up, and he reckons his customers will too. He is an active Trollopian, promotes the novels of his former customer Anthony Powell, was a lone salesman for Robertson Davies, particularly his Deptford Trilogy, before he was ever published in Britain. ‘What, a Canadian? A trilogy?’ one customer asked. ‘You must be joking?’ Heywood Hill under his aegis has been capable of selling 4-500 copies of single titles by such old shop favourites (and regulars) as Patrick Leigh Fermor and James LeesMilne. Such favours were returned. When Lees-Milne, a friend of Hill and the Mitfords (he was engaged to Hill’s wife-to-be before Hill was), gave up the library room in Bath that had been William Beckford’s, Saumarez Smith made a catalogue from the books there. He has made similar ‘owner’ catalogues posthumously from the collections of, among others, Anthony Powell, Edward Heath, A. L. Rowse, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Stephen Tumim, John Fuggles and John Cornforth. These are revealing in showing the compass of an individual’s interests, sometimes even more so in recording owner’s annotations (Rowse scribbling egotistically in the margins) or poignant presentation inscriptions. Such was the demand for his catalogue From the Library of Enoch Powell that he had to reprint; after nine days only one book failed to sell (Asian Drama by Gunnar Myrdal).
While Handasyde Buchanan told people he was Heywood Hill, for many Saumarez Smith has personified the shop, but he has always been supported by a small staff that somehow cram themselves into Curzon Street’s strait confines — an ‘academy’, as one of them put it, that has spawned such various booksellers as Johnny de Falbe, John Townend, John Francis Phillimore, James Tindley and George Ramsden. That so many of these staff have been so long-serving is a sign of loyalty not only to Saumarez Smith himself but also to the institution that is Heywood Hill.
The other day, John Saumarez Smith found a copy of a novel by Josephine Tey, The Expensive Halo, a book he hadn’t seen before. He was struck by a remark made by one of the characters — a violinist: ‘Very few people are able to make their living doing the thing they like best.’ Next to this, had Saumarez Smith been A. L. Rowse, he might have penned one thick tick.
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