A visit to an antique bookshop in London today was rewarding. A recent visit to an antique bookshop in London was rewarding.
It was interesting to a young woman too who happened to be in the sales counter. She spends most part of the day among hundreds of musty old books stacked up in big wooden shelves with glass windows at Sokol Books, a very rare type of bookshop on Fulham Road, Brompton, London.
The shop deals in rare, old books and manuscripts only.
As usual, Ammu was with me. She will sulk if I don’t take her with me when going to a bookshop.
But this bookshop, by any standards, was too hard for her age. Most of the books and manuscripts displayed there belong to the 16th or 17th centuries.
Geoffrey Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale or Monk’s Tale, for example, are good stories, but too “big” for a girl of seven. That too in archaic English.
Sarah, the lone young lady in the shop, was rather amused to see a man of 70 and a girl of seven together in a bookshop selling 300- or 400-year-old books.
She politely answered all my questions about Chaucer, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Marlowe, Dr. Johnson, Dickens... and showed us some rare manuscripts the shop so proudly possesses.
The copy of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales she showed us was printed in London in 1602, almost 200 years after Chaucer’s death in 1400. There may have been many other editions before this. The bookshop price, Sarah tells, for this book is £7,000.
As we came down from the second level through piles of antique books enjoying the kind of musty, rustic aroma, which Hermann Hesse, as he tells us in his novel Siddhartha, once smelt in the study of his grandfather Hermann Gundert.
Ammu was fresh and cheerful as ever. She said she was just smelling soil in the first summer rain... which she once smelt while in Kerala.
sebvaliakala@gmail.com
