18 Bookshops by Anne Scott

Author:Anne Scott [Scott, Anne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sandstone Press Ltd
Published: 2016-02-18T05:00:00+00:00

BOOKS OF WONDER

Books for Children Young and Old

It must be made from metal or wood, I know. It’s a chivalric blazon all the same, unfurls like a trumpet fall and opens out in other and further worlds.

11. The Turl Bookshop, Oxford:

If it were lost, then how?

In old guidebooks to Oxford some names are not so much printed as inlaid – the High, Magdalen Bridge, Carfax and Isis, Balliol, Trinity – patterns of gold and blue banded with youth. Collegiate streets go heralded – Holywell, Saint Giles.Beyond them in the everyday town, the buses run on plain serviceable highways named for their destinations too, but differently: Cowley Road, the Iffley Road, the Botley Road.

The Broad and the High were named to guide the earliest travellers searching out their paths by dimension and shape. Between them runs The Turl named for ‘tirl,’ an Anglo-Saxon gait, a strait place, narrow. Once it opened to a pathway from the city to Balliol and Trinity through the defences of the old wall. It is an allegory, a passage to be read in different ways, both a defence and an entry. Till 1363 it was Saint Mildred’s Street and later Sylver Street for the gold and silver smiths who had their work cells there.

This is the street where at Number 3, The Turl Cash Bookshop stood, selling old books, maps and prints and a famously rich hoard of classic modern fiction. I came here first in the 1970s, scurried along by a friend in the last minutes of an Oxford dusk.

Ten years later, I was back, by morning daylight and there it was, this Bookshop, taller than I thought, three storeys and an attic under a steep sloping roof. Five stretching windows of twelve panes each and below them, the shop. A band across its windows carried the name:-

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