The Bookshop at 10 Curzon Street: Letters between Nancy Mitford and Heywood Hill 1952-73

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These days, it is globally renowned for its library building services and highly personal yearly subscription. Holding a Royal Warrant, it is also beloved by the Queen, has an entire bookshelf dedicated to PG Wodehouse and in John Le Carre’s novels is George Smiley’s bookshop of choice. Algy Cluff OBE was born in 1940. He served for six years in the Army in West Africa, Cyprus and Borneo. A pioneer of North Sea oil exploration, he founded Cluff Oil in 1972. This lead to the discovery of the Buchan Field. There followed thirty years of exploration in the gold industry in Africa and the discovery and development of gold mines. He remains active in the oil business. Algy was the proprietor of The Spectator for five years and its Chairman for a further twenty. He was the proprietor of other magazines, including Apollo and the Literary Review.

After he left Heywood Hill, John continued to deal in books from John Sandoe and Maggs Bros. He was a natural writer who reviewed books widely and provided always considered advice to librarians and their patrons. Many across the book world will mourn him.Nancy’s friend Evelyn Waugh would come from Oxford to see her, bringing with him an array of future literary stars such as Harold Acton and Anthony Powell, as well as more established names: editor of Horizon magazine Cyril Connolly and Henry Green, whose 1929 novel, Living, is one of the great interwar works of fiction. Waugh described the shop as “a centre for all that was left of fashionable and intellectual London” and even when the war sent him across Europe, Nancy continued to supply him with books by Caryl Brahms, SJ Simon and Max Beerbohm.

The shop was opened by George Heywood Hill on 3 August 1936, with the help of Lady Anne Gathorne-Hardy, who would later become his wife. [2] [3] In 1947 the family returned to Britain, William Saumarez Smith becoming involved in church administration, latterly as appointments secretary to the Archbishops of Canterbury and York.On reading Algy Cluff's first volume, Get On With It, Tom Stoppard remarked that the author's subsequent book should be titled ‘The Importance of Being Algy’ The year is 1936: Jesse Owens embarrasses the Third Reich at its own Olympics, Edward VIII ascends the throne and Heywood Hill, a little bookshop on Curzon Street in Mayfair, opens its doors for the first time. Named after the proprietor George Heywood Hill, an Old Etonian who married the daughter of the Earl of Cranbrook, the bookshop initially specialised in first and limited editions as well as Victorian toys, with most of its clientele aristocrats due to its affluent location. Mitford’s early novels did not provide her with enough money with which to live securely, and much of her work served to further rip at the fraught threads of her family relationships. Following the poor reception of her early books and Britain once again entering a devastating war, Nancy became completely disillusioned with writing, and in the spring of 1942 took a job at a small bookshop that was a two and a half mile walk from her Maida Vale home.

Heywood Hill is a bookshop at 10 Curzon Street in the Mayfair district of London. [1] History [ edit ] He joined Heywood Hill as an assistant to the splendidly named Handasyde (“Handy”) Buchanan, who had been taken on as a partner in 1945 by the shop’s founder, a gentle, bookish old Etonian. Buchanan had previously worked for another antiquarian bookshop in Curzon Street which had been bombed out; his wife Mollie was already working in Heywood Hill in charge of accounts. He would often put aside a copy of a book he thought might appeal to a particular customer, and those who lived abroad – or in rural seclusion – depended on him to send them the best of recently publications. “He possesses the uncanny ability,” observed a transatlantic admirer in The New York Times, “to send out of the blue the exact book one’s been wishing for, so closely does he follow his customers’ interests and development.” He also sold a set of Winston Churchill’s four-volume life of his ancestor the Duke of Marlborough, written in the 1930s, that had once resided at Windsor Castle. The first volume was inscribed by Churchill to “the Prince of Wales”; the second to “HRH Prince of Wales”; the third to “King Edward”, and the fourth to “the Duke of Windsor”. Several tomes later, and with due deference to Stoppard and Wilde, Algy has taken the suggestion on board. Here you will discover why Ian Fleming never achieved his heart's desire, delve into the Guinness Affair, marvel at the fast and louche life of the ‘Peter Pan of Mayfair’ and accompany the author to - and then swiftly away from - a disastrous dinner with Princess Margaret. Alongside come despatches from the gold mining and oil industries and a reflection on the parlous state of humour in the modern world, among other eclectic gems from the pen of a true character.Over the years he took on a series of poorly remunerated but bookish assistants, many of whom, inspired by his traditional approach to book-selling, went on to make their own names in the independent book trade. When the spring of 1945 came around, almost three years to the day since Nancy started work at the shop, she was granted three months leave to bunker down and finish the book. She disappeared to the estate of Lord Berners (played in the BBC series by Andrew Scott), not leaving her room until her daily word count was completed. By the time the three months was up, the book was finished and the war in Europe had been won. Mitford returned to the shop that summer and sold the book (against her expectations) to publishing house Hamish Hamilton. She was finally able to leave the daily grind of bookselling behind. From Winchester, where he was a scholar, John Saumarez Smith read Classics at Trinity College, Cambridge. Before going up, thinking that he might like to go into publishing, he took a temporary job in the science department of the Cambridge bookshop Heffers.

In fact the clientele was drawn from a wider social milieu than what Saumarez Smith referred to as the “carriage trade”. And in his later years he had to put up with a new breed of City trader who came “looking for something flash-looking that costs a lot”. John is survived by his devoted wife and their two talented sons. We send sincere condolences to them all. At Heywood Hill we salute John for his unstinting tenure at our helm, and the indelible mark he has left on the place. John Saumarez Smith, who has died aged 78, was for 34 years the managing director and presiding genius of Heywood Hill, the tiny bookshop in Curzon Street, Mayfair, which from its foundation in 1936 has been the favoured haunt of bibliophiles from across the English-speaking world. John Hugh Saumarez Smith was born in the Indian hill station of Simla on May 23 1943, the oldest of four children of William Saumarez Smith, a senior official in the Indian Civil Service who would be involved in arrangements for Partition, and his wife Betty, née Raven. A younger brother is the art historian and museum director Sir Charles Saumarez Smith.John had a first-class mind including a truly prodigious memory for both books and people. He came to personify Heywood Hill for his many admirers across the world. John’s scholarly air, mischievous grin and deep, broad book knowledge made Heywood Hill a magnet for the affluent well-read. His style was perfectly suited to the book-lined stage of this little shop. Annual trips to America added many transatlantic customers to our ledgers and John was warmly welcomed into bookish drawing-rooms, and indeed libraries, everywhere. After standing down as managing director of Heywood Hill on his 65th birthday in 2008, he continued to sell books as an independent and even acquired a computer. Christopher Hibbert; Ben Weinreb (2008). The London Encyclopaedia. Macmillan. pp.395–396. ISBN 978-1-4050-4924-5 . Retrieved 11 July 2017. But Buchanan turned out to be a pompous and patronising figure, whom Evelyn Waugh once described as possessing all “the concealed malice of the underdog”. Before long he and the even more malicious Mollie had succeeded in alienating both staff and customers. Hill retired in 1966 and retreated to Suffolk rather than endure the couple any longer.