THE NICK PIGOTT INTERVIEW
The final chapter
Britain’s biggest railway bookshop has closed after more than half a century of trading. Owner Robert Humm looks back on a remarkable career and tells Nick Pigott how the publishing industry has changed in the face of the internet onslaught.
Robert and Clare in their library alongside a full set of The Railway Magazine bound volumes.
ALL PHOTOS TAKEN BY NICK PIGOTT
LEAF through issues of The Railway Magazine published in the 1980s and you will be treated to an array of offerings from specialist bookshops and publishers. One double-page advert alone in 1984 listed no fewer than 750 in-print titles from the likes of David & Charles, Ian Allan, Bradford Barton, Haynes, Janes and Patrick Stephens.
Today, the era of very large-scale railway publishing houses has passed and the number of high street bookshops devoted primarily to trains and open daily to the public can be counted on the fingers of one hand.
Sadly, the biggest of them all has now closed its doors for the final time. August 26 last year saw Robert Humm lock his emporium in the historic Lincolnshire town of Stamford and call it a day after more than half a century of purveying books and magazines to transport enthusiasts. “I’ve had a wonderful career but I’m tired, my joints are creaking and lugging heavy boxes around no longer appeals,” he told me resignedly a few days after his 80th birthday.
Advancing age is not the only reason for Robert Humm & Co to cease trading, however, for the bookdealing market as a whole has changed beyond recognition since he entered it as a fresh-faced 29-year-old in 1974.
At that time, members of the vast schoolboy spotting fraternity of the 1950s and ’60s were reaching their 30s and 40s, and many had switched to collecting words rather than numbers. Over the next three or four decades, the range of publications on lines and locos rocketed in terms of both quantity and quality – and cover prices rose commensurately, £30 or £40 for a single volume becoming normal for some of the more lavish examples.
It was natural in those days for enthusiasts spending large chunks of disposable income on building a personal library to assume they were amassing a nice little nest-egg in the process… and that when they passed away or went into a care home, the hundreds of publications they had accrued would prove a valuable investment for their families to cash in on.
Unfortunately, it has not turned out like that. Because Britain’s legions of steam and early-diesel enthusiasts are reaching roughly the same age at roughly the same time, the secondhand market has become utterly inundated with what are termed ‘pre-loved’ (in other words unwanted) titles, all looking for new owners and failing to find them.
Large collections are even seen by some as a burden, especially if they contain a high proportion of ‘coffee table’ books, picture albums and general interest titles of the type once shifted in vast numbers by the Railway Book Club. They can be a burden in more literal ways too, for their bulk and weight can cause problems not only for shelves and joists but for families keen to turn storage areas back into living space.