BOOKSHOPS

Archive Books in central London, with its toppling book towers and rubble bags full of sheet music, offers serendipity and a refuge from cloned high streets. But for how much longer?

by ALAN RUSBRIDGER

PHOTOGRAPHY FOR PROSPECT BY SARAH MLEE

Forget your Iron Age settlements and your crumbling monasteries. I have an urgent nomination for a Unesco World Heritage Site listing. You will find it in an unprepossessing street not far from Marylebone Station in central London. It’s not a cathedral or medieval relic. It’s a dusty bookshop.

Every town used to have at least one rambling bookshop like Archive Books on Bell Street—a haphazard emporium of the treasured, the rare, the tatty, the forgotten, the never-read and the waiting-to-be-discovered. They were—before business rates and the internet combined to snuff them out—little oases of musty calm away from the unforgiving high streets and identikit chains outside.

There’s a version of the kind of sanctuary they offer in the junk shop in Nineteen Eighty-Four, where Winston Smith and Julia escape from the brutal dreariness of a society intent on severing any links with the past. “To know that it was there, inviolate, was almost the same as being in it,” wrote Orwell. It was “a world, a pocket of the past where extinct animals could walk.”

Orwell’s shop (“the tiny interior was in fact uncomfortably full”) was presided over by a Mr Charrington (not quite who he seemed) who “had always vaguely the air of being a collector rather than a tradesman.” At Archive Books, the curator—it feels a little vulgar to call him a mere bookseller—is Tim Meaker, 71. He is a benign, lived-in figure who should be played by Bill Nighy if Stephen Frears ever makes a film about a picaresque second-hand bookshop. Tim took over the business nearly 45 years ago and, in the event that Unesco agree to list Archive Books, should be part of that deal.