ONCE UPON A TOME

An antiquarian bookseller shares tricks and quirks of the trade.

Books about bookshops are popular, as Shaun Bythell’s diaries on life at the helm of Scotland’s largest secondhand bookshop have proved. Darkshire adds to the genre with this frequently hilarious work. On a whim, the author answered an ad for Henry Sotheran Ltd, a London antiquarian bookshop that opened in 1761, with its smell of old books, “a faintly unsatisfied smell, as if they’re all distantly aware that they’ve missed their chance to be a worldwide smash hit.” He accepted the shop’s offer to take part in their two-year training program even though “the wages for an apprentice bookseller seemed to have been frozen around when the Old Curiosity Shop opened for business in 1840.” In sections that correspond to subject classifications, Darkshire describes his years working at the shop. Among the characters populating this work are colleagues such as James, the man who trained him and watched over the shop with “suspender-clad perspicacity,” and the “cryptids,” or customers, who fit neatly into one of three categories: “They have never purchased a book….They are peculiar enough that you have doubts they are real….They repeatedly return to the scene of the crime as if drawn by a lure.” Then there are the shop’s oddities, from mysteries such as the “books hurling themselves from shelves when no one is present” to the Sotheran Curse, which began in the late 19th century after the last Henry Sotheran was killed by a tram, “which I think we can all agree was rather thoughtless of him.” The book is a series of anecdotes, which occasionally makes for choppy reading, but Darkshire makes up for this minor quibble with considerable, often dark humor. For example, in his description of bookbinding methods, he notes, “it is technically possible to bind a book in human leather, but the practice is frowned upon.”

A delightful portrait of “the ugly stepchild of the antiques business or the art world.”