London Bookshop Crawl: Cecil Court

Welcome to the penultimate edition of my series of posts about the shops we're visiting on the London Bookshop Crawl! This is a bit of a cheat really, since there are seven bookshops in Cecil Court, but as none of them are huge and we will be visiting them as one stop on the crawl I thought I'd post a little bit about all of them here!

In case you've not been before, Cecil Court is a pedestrianised street between Charing Cross Road and St Martin's Lane. All the shops have Victorian fronts and hanging signs and a lot of them sell rare or antiquarian books.

Tenderbooks 

Mainly focusing on art books, they have monthly exhibitions focused on a particular artist or press as well as regular launches and events.

Marchpane

I'm the most excited to visit this shop as it specialises in children's and illustrated books from the 1800s to the present day. As the name implies, their real specialism is Lewis Carroll and so they have many and various editions of the Alice books as well as Carroll's other works and some Alice ephemera.

Travis and Emery Music Bookshop

This is Rhys' favourite shop down this road as it sells out of print, second hand and antiquarian sheet music and books about music.

Peter Ellis

Antiquarian booksellers stocking mostly first editions over a range of genres.

Watkins Books

Describing itself as an esoteric bookshop, Watkins also publishes books in the spiritual and new science genres. They also have a quarterly magazine and host regular events.

Goldsboro Books

Goldsboro aims to provide its customers with signed first editions. It was founded in 1999 and is impressively dedicated to bringing brilliant, special and often exclusive signed books to its customers. They have a Book of the Month Club, where you sign up and are sent a signed book that they think is great and has the possibility of becoming collectible each month. Many of them are exclusive to Goldsboro, and although due to the nature of what they sell it's not the cheapest, not all of the books are really expensive (signed and numbered edition of Haniya Yanagihara's A Little Life for £199.99, anyone? Probably not on this trip!). It looks like a lovely shop.

Erica's review

Stephen Poole Fine Books

Specialist in 20th Century literature, this shop has separate sections for Crime fiction and books shortlisted for literary awards as well as some signed copies.

Although I've browsed in Cecil Court before (usually killing time while Rhys went through sheet music in Travis and Emery) I've not really spent any amount of time in any of these shops. As you'll see, I've linked to Erica's review of Goldsboro Books above as she has actually been to it, and I'm hopeful that it'll be a fun stop on our crawl!

London Bookshop Crawl: London Review Bookshop

It's another not really edition of Make Mine an Indie featuring another stop on our London Bookshop Crawl! It's just a couple of weeks away and honestly browsing the websites to write these posts has ramped my excitement levels up to fever pitch. When the day actually comes I may be so excited I'll have lost all ability to actually make words and will just run round waving all my bookish tote bags at people. You have been warned...

When we voted for the shops we wanted to include in the itinerary for this event the London Review Bookshop came top, and looking at the website I can see why. It looks like it has everything I want in a bookshop; space to browse without falling over each other, amazing cake and a lot of books. I watched their short video of their customers talking about why they love the bookshop and several people said something about wanting to go to bookshops to find the thing they didn't know they wanted to read and I was there nodding along. I've steered myself away from writing any kinds of lists for the crawl as I want to surprise myself with what I'll find and I'm particularly excited about what I might find here.

The London Review Bookshop was opened by the London Review of Books in 2003 and considering it's round the corner from the British Museum and has cake it's a bit of a travesty that I've not yet been there. They stock over 20,000 titles in a massive range of subjects and aim to be "intelligent without being pompous; engaged without being partisan". Honestly, I think we're going to do very well there...

If you haven't already please, please check out their website. In the about section they have a little map of all the things they think you should do around Bloomsbury once you've visited them, and I kind of wish we could. I once did a writers walk around that area, finding blue plaques for Virginia Woolf et al and it was awesome... Another thing for another time!

Add to all of this the fact that they have their own cake shop, in which the tea is served 'in the manner that most complements its flavour'. They have an actual tea menu and it's nine pages long. I feel like I've found my spiritual home, after all this time.

As you can see, these posts are a little more biased than my Make Mine an Indie posts usually are, but that's because I've been excited about organising the bookshop crawl for so long now that it's literally getting to the point where all I can do is jump up and down and squeak about it. Also all of these bookshops look so awesome that it's impossible not to get excited about them. Honestly I think my excitement levels show how I did exactly the right thing starting this blog.

If you've been and have other good things to say about it that I've missed out please feel free to say them in the comments, and if you're on the bookshop crawl with me please be aware that you may have to physically remove me from this shop...

Find the London Review Bookshop on their website, twitter (for the book shop and the cake shop), Facebook and Instagram or with us on February 6th!

Check out my posts about other #LondonBookshopCrawl stops Orbital Comics and Persephone or catch up with the rest of the Make Mine an Indie series here.