Browse by Henry Hitchings

Author:Henry Hitchings [Henry Hitchings]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781782272533
Publisher: Pushkin Press
Published: 2016-09-08T04:00:00+00:00

Later, Elizabeth reaches for her phone. “You have to speak to Yasmin,” she says.

A woman with a laugh in her voice says “Hello”.

“Is this the book lady?” I ask.

Yasmin giggles.

Later she asks, “Do you know that ours was the first real bookshop in Nairobi?”

* * *

The vision started in the time before 1971, the year that Westlands Sundries became a legal entity. It is the story of a man’s profound love affair with books in an era when television broadcasts stopped at 10 p.m. and there was plenty of time to read and talk. Sayed Mohamed, in between his accounting duties, would lurk in auction houses waiting to bid on book lots. The books were for his own consumption. He had already acquired a large collection when a friend who had built an office block in Westlands asked if he wanted a shop space downstairs. He took the space and registered the business as “Westlands Sundries”, intending to sell anything—toys, stationery, household goods—not yet imagining that the books he also sold would become the mainstay.

Yasmin, his daughter, would visit the shop with her father before she went to school, and attended to it after school. She saw the books take over the store.

“It was inevitable,” Yasmin notes, “for literature was my father’s true passion. Anyone who walked into the shop to buy an oven, more often than not, ended up leaving with a book or two.”

We laugh.

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