It is entirely to the credit of both correspondents that they are able to see the situation as essentially comic. As time passes the beastly Buchanans increasingly appear as ludicrous figures, and the emphasis is allowed to shift to other areas. There are welcome sightings of a few favourite old customers, such as Harold Acton and Nancy Mitford, as well as some fascinating details of book-trade business, with topics ranging from current bestsellers (the Chips Channon Diaries and Michael Holroyd’s biography of Lytton Strachey) to the annual panic over finding a suitable Christmas present for Osbert Sitwell to give the Queen Mother. From time to time Heywood, who is still doing a little dealing from home, consults his colleague over the problems involved in valuing second-hand books. He describes, for instance, being asked by a customer to look at two sets of a 1903 edition of Flora and Sylva, ‘in the bookcase near his armchair… [but] his Dachshund found that a mouse had got behind the books and he chewed the bottom of the spines of the two volumes which has not improved the look of them … Could you give me an idea of their value?’
The story ends, I am happy to say, with the enemy routed. Mollie, after a truly stupendous row, is finally sacked by the shop’s tough new owner, David Bacon. Not only sacked but forced to leave: during Heywood’s time at the shop he had sacked her five times but she had taken no notice, turning up as usual the next day. And Handy is seen off with a rousing retirement party, after which peace descends on number 10 Curzon Street. As Saumarez Smith writes to his old friend in Suffolk, ‘It does make a difference when everyone in the shop is HAPPY.’
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