The Bookseller.com

7th January 2009

Martin Latham is manager of Waterstone's Canterbury.

Who's at the wheel?

02.10.08

Independent publisher The Little Bookroom has just produced Jamie Cahill's The Pâtisseries of Paris. The book is as cosy and evocative as its subject and filled me with wonder. It also addressed the question: how do all these French pâtisseries survive?

Part of the answer lies in Cahill's encounter at Marandon's, where Monsieur Marandon starts work on his flour-dusted floors at 3 a.m. He has been at it for 20 years and his millefeuille is renowned. (I don't know what it is either.) Asked why he does it he said simply: "C'est mon métier." How many of us can answer thus? That untranslatable "métier" has, as the Times' reviewer Erica Wagner put it, "a connotation of vocation" and you can tell if this love is present within minutes of entering any shop.

Robert Topping's Ely and Bath bookshops have nice matting and teapots, but so do lots of bookshops. What makes them feel inspiring is that "The Major", as John Mortimer calls him, is a Marandon figure. He has found his métier. A bookseller at Manchester Waterstone's who used to share the bus home with him told me that his conversation rarely strayed from bookselling and Topping often got off early to deliver a customer order. Whenever I called that shop he was on the till courteous and relaxed.

I recently discovered Leakey's bookshop in Inverness, a Calvinist chapel now flooded with books, even the damnation-haunted pulpit. It has a superb café, a log-cabin stove, and extraordinary stock, including a hardback of Evans-Wentz's The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries (the first I had ever seen: £300 sadly). Old Leakey sat at the centre of the chancel like a wizard in a cardigan. After he had told me that it was only the second copy he had ever seen, I babbled on about the newspaper article I had seen on his shop. The calmness with which he replied: "I never read the papers", made me wonder why I do.

Andrew Stilwell at the London Review Bookshop is another captain of his ship, who stocked the entire 11-volume Journals of Lord Byron under the biography table "in case anyone asks one day" (they did). Quintessentially, he once double-booked a lager-tasting session with a wood-carving demonstration. His alumni are scattered through bookshops and publishers' boardrooms.

Customers crave a bit of personality and they sniff out places where somebody really gives a damn. Both chain stores and independents can exude this sense that someone is on the bridge, be they Jack Sparrow or Captain Kirk, and no doubt the shops with a healthy future have a Spock around too, to raise an eyebrow when required.

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