Bookshops and the Character of a City

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Cecil Court in London, via Wikimedia Commons

A factotum is a person who does all kinds of work, and in Marius Kociejowski’s book A Factotum in the Book Trade, he writes, among other things, about the odd jobs he did as an assistant in an antiquarian bookshop on London’s Cecil Court (known for its second-hand stores) before it closed and moved online. The book is a funny, sometimes cantankerous memoir about Kociejowski’s life as a reader and in the book trade in London.

But it’s mainly about the bookshops themselves—specifically antiquarian bookshops—and the booksellers who run them and the collectors they serve. It is a lament for a way of buying books and a culture that, at least in Kociejowski’s view, is quickly disappearing. Early on, Kociejowski writes, “Secondhand bookshops, once a feature of almost every borough, town and village, continue to close, even in supposedly bookish places like Oxford and Cambridge”: