“I have no idea exactly how many books we have here now. We collect as many as we can and they [readers] buy as many as they wish. It’s an ongoing process. It has been like this since we started in 1979,” Sam, son and business partner of Charles Leakey, the founder of Leakey’s Bookshop, told me.
Leakey’s is the largest second-hand bookshop in the U.K.
I was talking to him in his modest office at the bookshop on Church Street, Inverness, Scotland. Talking to this young handsome man in his early thirties was as exhilarating as walking through the narrow passages between long lines of huge shelves stacked with old musty books and browsing them at liberty.
I came to Inverness and to Leakey’s from Tomatin after a hectic tour of the Highlands and a good night’s sleep over there. I was all fresh, enthusiastic and curious as any lectiophile would naturally be. I had done, as usual, some home work on the Scottish culture and literature, libraries and bookshops in Inverness, Edinburgh and Glasgow before I embarked on this biblio tour for 20 weeks.
I entered Leakey’s, the wonderful world of used books, shortly after it was opened in the morning. There were some 20 or so people in the different parts of the shop — some browsing and some just wondering at the enormous collection of musty used books. For me, it was more than excitement. I was in a trance. I paced up and down the shop, smelling, touching, caressing, cajoling and at times, even kissing the books.
I particularly liked the sweet smell that belongs to the old books. The books intoxicate an avid reader anywhere in the world.
The bibliosmia and the tempting presence of my literary heroes in the form of books elevated me, I think, to an esoteric world where only books and writers exist. In the frenzy that I was in, I could not think or recollect the books I always wanted to buy from any used-book store that I might come across.
Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, now renamed In Search of Lost Time, for example, was a book I had been looking for years now. Actually the first volume of this enormous book was already with me and so I made it a point to look for the other volumes wherever I go in India or abroad.
But now, precisely at this moment, Proust was not coming to mind, let alone the second and other volumes of his famous work. Then, in a golden moment, some strange names flashed through the overexcited brain which, then, slowly flew down through the overcharged memory lane. The first title that came to the mind was still an enigma for me.
It was a very a curious and totally unfamiliar book by a very obscure Victorian poet Arthur Huge Clough — Bothie of Toper-na-Fuosich (Bothie for short). It was a long narrative poem by Clough which I had never come across or studied in my life.
Bothie came tinkling in the ears time and again and no other title seemed to have ever existed. Why Bothie so adamant and compulsive? Was it a fallout of the previous night’s reading? While reading, mostly from the Net, about the Scottish culture and literature, I happened to read a story about Clough’s Bothie of Taper-na-Fuosich.
A bothie is a forester’s hut and so far, so good. And what is the meaning of the other words in the title? I read from the materials I had for my reference that fuosich in Galeic meant female genitals. Clough, it appears, was not quite familiar with Gaelic and some Scottish locals fooled him to use the word in the title of his poem! Thus I decided, just because nothing else came to mind, to look for Bothie. I went up through the spiral staircase and, on reaching the place where Victorian (and other) poetry generally rested, I rummaged through the good old books stacked there.
Clough or his Bothie was not anywhere there. But, to my surprise, I found Rabindranath Tagore’s Gitanjali in some other part of the bookshop. To speak about other Indian connections, I saw Rudyard Kipling and Ruskin Bond peeping from a dusty shelf.
At the sales desk, I saw a beautiful young woman and a handsome young man. I approached him and asked if I could talk to him. “Of course, by all means,” he said with a welcoming glee in his eyes.
During the course of the conversation, I understood he was Sam. We opened the conversation in a light-hearted vein.
The history of Leakey’s is fascinating. And inspiring too.
Started in a first floor room in Grant’s Close in 1979, Leakey’s had further expanded and moved to two other larger spaces before finally settling at the Greyfriars Hall on Church Street.
As the story goes, Charles Leakey, struggling with space shortage, came to know that the disused Greyfriars Hall, which was once St. Mary’s Gaelic Church of the 17th century, was under a proposal for sale and a nightclub’s proposal was being considered. Leakey approached the church authorities and convinced them of his imaginative proposal of a bookstall.
The church was convinced and agreed to Leakey’s proposal. Charles Leakey then customised the architecturally splendid building with a spiral staircase, but he allowed the major portions of the Greyfriars to remain intact. Thus this place has became Leakey’s new fashionable address with book lovers all over the world.
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