In the Stairway of Former Greats (One of my best loved places in London)

I think I may have mentioned how much I love books. I'm spending long stretches of my silly life trying to make them, after all, and when I'm not, I'm looking for them, eyeing dog-eared, water-logged copies of strangers on the metro and peeking over shoulders. I don't have a place I love getting them here, but that might be due to my general widespread disenchantment with my native city. I can't like a place that's one of several, some booknook in a mall that looks...well, like any other booknook in every other mall.

Nestled down a quiet street just across the road from the Saatchi Gallery in London, there stands a little (well, not so little) eighteenth-century building housing one of the nicest bookshops I've ever been in. Founded in 1957 by an English bookseller, John Sandoe (Books) Ltd. has seemed like a charming, other place to me ever since I first heard about it. I love the brackets, don't you?

(Books) - To save you the trouble of coming all this way for hats or ties. I loved the name when I found it on some list of indie London bookstores that are a must for any book-lover. I've tried to tour most of them, but few have stayed with me in the same way John Sandoe has.

I must've spent a great chunk of my first visit here just running around the place, spotting my favorite authors and actors in framed, usually autographed pictures and postcards pinned across their walls. No grand gallery of fame, no, just little bits taped over narrow staircases or in-between two shelves. There's Dylan somewhere. I know I had a picture, but I seem to have lost it. Oh well. He's the same round little cigarette-dangling-fat-on-lip man with the most brilliant, unique mind. So you're not missing much.

You can easily spend an hour there just playing who's who with their walls, and if you're lucky and go on a bust morning when they're arranging books or negotiating cramped spaces with random customers, they might not even mind you much.

But then, there's the books. How can you ignore the books? There's a little something for everyone here, though probably my favorite place is the downstairs. It's a winding place, full of stairs and ups and downs and stacks of books that belong nowhere quite.

But downstairs. Downstairs someone have the brilliant idea of combining psychology books with poetry and drama. I've gotten several exciting literary biographies from down there, and I'm quite sure @ladyrebecca has found a lot of stuff on Jung and other clever old pipe-smokers.

It's the sort of place where you find things you didn't know you were looking for. Even now, my heart weeps for this immense, lovely tome I saw there, a Harold Bloom book on Shakespeare. What better man to talk of Shakespeare? By the time of finding, however, I had a long list of things to fit into my bag already, including an AC Bradley I'd found in a second-hand shop on Shakespearean tragedy. So I figure maybe next time.

There's war books and long-lost history. There's Hunter Thompson and lovely little editions of Jane Austen and Jane Eyre and probably a dozen other Janes who you never even heard about, but you want because in your soul, you never ever wanna leave here. You just wish you could curl up on a stairway somewhere, and not get in the way, and hopefully they bring you toasted bagels with cream cheese every so often so you don't starve.

And you think, I could be quite happy here.

So if you're ever headed to London take me with you make some time to stop in Sloane Square and visit this charming little place. I swear you won't go away empty-handed.