Independent Booksellers
Iqbal Ahmed in the Independent on a writer’s best friend:
Without independent bookshops, London would be for me what Baudelaire calls “a desert without oasis”. My love affair with bookshops began 25 years ago in Srinagar. The Kashmir Bookshop, run by a long-bearded Sikh philanthropist, was the only one selling general books in our town of half a million inhabitants. One day his assistant, Ghulam Mohammed, kindly offered me a copy of a big hardback on credit. The price of the book was over a hundred rupees. It took many people a month to earn that much money. I felt indebted to Ghulam for life.
Having contributed a brief article to the LRB a year before, I received a discount card in the post when the London Review Bookshop opened in Bloomsbury in May 2003. However, I failed to seek it out for several weeks. Then one afternoon, I ventured beyond Museum Street off Great Russell Street and found the shop in a quiet side-road. I wanted a copy of The Writer’s Handbook to avail myself of the LRB discount card. They didn’t have a copy but offered to order one for me. I had worked a few years before in a chain bookshop located on the other side of the British Museum in Bloomsbury and remembered it stocking a whole pallet of The Writer’s Handbook.
I found later that my first purchase from the London Review Bookshop was useful only in facilitating rejection letters from literary agents and publishers.
More.
(Hat-tip, Kamila Shamsie)
