James Fergusson

John Saumarez Smith at 65

James Fergusson remembers John Saumarez Smith

‘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 know- ledgeable 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 knock- about 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.

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