The Bookshop at 10 Curzon Street: Letters between Nancy Mitford and Heywood Hill 1952-73

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Featuring stunning, specially commissioned photography of the gardens and parkland, alongside long-forgotten images and memorabilia newly unearthed in the estate archives, this vivid companion, crowded with character and colour, is a book to treasure and revisit over and over again. For London’s Artemis Fund Managers, chair John Dodd wanted a library that would inspire his partners and associates in freedom of thought. “Thinking independently is a defining strand of the DNA of the partnership,” Dunne explains. Heywood Hill’s concept was simple and yet provocative, what Dunne describes as “a readers’ library that captures capitalism in all its layers and colors: the heroes, the villains, the groundbreakers, the headbangers, people with good ideas and bad, those who innovated and those whose ideas were in fact dead ends, people who moved markets in the past and who are moving them in the present.” When Heywood Hill opened his eponymous bookshop, Nancy Mitford was not known for her writing but for her eccentric family – a cause célèbre as a result of their fevered embracing of all things Hitler, with sister Diana marrying fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosely (and later imprisoned alongside him as a danger to the king's realm). The Thirties had been difficult for Nancy. She had released a number of books that received neither acclaim nor sales, but caused much controversy within her inner circle, particularly Wigs on the Green – a savage satire of her family’s enthusiasm for fascism. Mitford’s early novels did not provide her with enough money with which to live securely, and much of her work served to further rip at the fraught threads of her family relationships. Following the poor reception of her early books and Britain once again entering a devastating war, Nancy became completely disillusioned with writing, and in the spring of 1942 took a job at a small bookshop that was a two and a half mile walk from her Maida Vale home.

Algy Cluff OBE was born in 1940. He served for six years in the Army in West Africa, Cyprus and Borneo. A pioneer of North Sea oil exploration, he founded Cluff Oil in 1972. This lead to the discovery of the Buchan Field. There followed thirty years of exploration in the gold industry in Africa and the discovery and development of gold mines. He remains active in the oil business. Algy was the proprietor of The Spectator for five years and its Chairman for a further twenty. He was the proprietor of other magazines, including Apollo and the Literary Review. One day a student rushed in and explained that he had just come from a wonderful lecture and urgently needed a copy of a book entitled The Phytosociology and Ecology of Cryptogamic Epiphytes. Saumarez Smith established that it was published by John Wiley, cost 63 shillings, and would be there in two weeks’ time. A few minutes later another equally breathless student came in, looking “for a book called …” Christopher Hibbert; Ben Weinreb (2008). The London Encyclopaedia. Macmillan. pp.395–396. ISBN 978-1-4050-4924-5 . Retrieved 11 July 2017. Saumarez Smith edited two collections of correspondence, which gave a fascinating glimpse into 20th-century literary London through the perspective of the distinguished, sometimes dysfunctional, bookshop staff.

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In 1947 the family returned to Britain, William Saumarez Smith becoming involved in church administration, latterly as appointments secretary to the Archbishops of Canterbury and York. The shop was opened by George Heywood Hill on 3 August 1936, with the help of Lady Anne Gathorne-Hardy, who would later become his wife. [2] [3] The year is 1936: Jesse Owens embarrasses the Third Reich at its own Olympics, Edward VIII ascends the throne and Heywood Hill, a little bookshop on Curzon Street in Mayfair, opens its doors for the first time. Named after the proprietor George Heywood Hill, an Old Etonian who married the daughter of the Earl of Cranbrook, the bookshop initially specialised in first and limited editions as well as Victorian toys, with most of its clientele aristocrats due to its affluent location. He also sold a set of Winston Churchill’s four-volume life of his ancestor the Duke of Marlborough, written in the 1930s, that had once resided at Windsor Castle. The first volume was inscribed by Churchill to “the Prince of Wales”; the second to “HRH Prince of Wales”; the third to “King Edward”, and the fourth to “the Duke of Windsor”. Follow Alan into Chatsworth's irresistible world of visionaries, pioneers, heroes, villains and English eccentrics, and celebrate the men and women who have shaped the history of the estate over five centuries. With his passionate knowledge of both the house and gardens, as well as his long-established relationship with the Cavendish family, Alan is the perfect guide with whom to explore the Palace of the Peaks.

Nancy’s friend Evelyn Waugh would come from Oxford to see her, bringing with him an array of future literary stars such as Harold Acton and Anthony Powell, as well as more established names: editor of Horizon magazine Cyril Connolly and Henry Green, whose 1929 novel, Living, is one of the great interwar works of fiction. Waugh described the shop as “a centre for all that was left of fashionable and intellectual London” and even when the war sent him across Europe, Nancy continued to supply him with books by Caryl Brahms, SJ Simon and Max Beerbohm. They bring a focus not only to love of the canon, but also cherishing the feel of a book as a wonderful object. While the specific titles are subject to availability, the majority are available to gift to yourself or others and bring an elegant literary flair to any home. He joined Heywood Hill as an assistant to the splendidly named Handasyde (“Handy”) Buchanan, who had been taken on as a partner in 1945 by the shop’s founder, a gentle, bookish old Etonian. Buchanan had previously worked for another antiquarian bookshop in Curzon Street which had been bombed out; his wife Mollie was already working in Heywood Hill in charge of accounts.Over the years he took on a series of poorly remunerated but bookish assistants, many of whom, inspired by his traditional approach to book-selling, went on to make their own names in the independent book trade. After he left Heywood Hill, John continued to deal in books from John Sandoe and Maggs Bros. He was a natural writer who reviewed books widely and provided always considered advice to librarians and their patrons. Many across the book world will mourn him. Alison Flood (30 September 2016). "Prize of a lifetime: London bookshop offers free books for the rest of your life | Books". The Guardian . Retrieved 11 July 2017.

But Buchanan turned out to be a pompous and patronising figure, whom Evelyn Waugh once described as possessing all “the concealed malice of the underdog”. Before long he and the even more malicious Mollie had succeeded in alienating both staff and customers. Hill retired in 1966 and retreated to Suffolk rather than endure the couple any longer. John’s paternal great-grandfather, William Saumarez Smith, was the Primate of Australia, while his great-great-great grandfather, Joseph Smith, was William Pitt’s private secretary. On his mother’s side his grandfather was the theologian Canon Charles Raven, who became Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, Master of Christ’s College and vice-chancellor of the university. handsomely bound in full red crushed morocco, boards with 5 gilt line panels, spine richly panelled and lettered in gilt. After standing down as managing director of Heywood Hill on his 65th birthday in 2008, he continued to sell books as an independent and even acquired a computer.On reading Algy Cluff's first volume, Get On With It, Tom Stoppard remarked that the author's subsequent book should be titled ‘The Importance of Being Algy’ From Winchester, where he was a scholar, John Saumarez Smith read Classics at Trinity College, Cambridge. Before going up, thinking that he might like to go into publishing, he took a temporary job in the science department of the Cambridge bookshop Heffers.