John Saumarez Smith, editor: the Bookshop at 10 Curzon Street: Letters between Nancy Mitford and Heywood Hill.(Book Review)

John Saumarez Smith, editor The Bookshop at 10 Curzon Street: Letters between Nancy Mitford and Heywood Hill, 1952-73. Frances Lincoln, 191 pages, 12.99 [pounds sterling]

"When a man is tired of London," Dr. Johnson observed, "he is tired of life." By the same token, when a man is tired of Heywood Hill, he is tired of books. This charming London bookstore, tucked away in a quiet bit of Mayfair, is my favorite purveyor of books. It sells new books--I always acquire a few when I go there--but it is for its couches of old and rare books that the shop is best known. "Couches"? That, it turns out, is Heywood Hill-ese for piles, of which there is an enticing abundance in this bookshop.

By comparison with today's Barnes & Noble leviathans, HH is tiny, but it has a stellar collection, always full of surprises, and what they don't happen to have they know about and can always get. John Saumarez Smith, who came to the shop in 1965 and now runs it, is cheerfully omniscient and somehow manages to turn up even the most out-of-the-way volume within weeks. I've never been able to stump him, though I have tried. I wonder if Nancy Mitford, who worked at Heywood Hill's shop in the 1940s, was as impressively erudite.

As Mr. Saumarez Smith notes, there is no shortage of published material about Nancy Mitford and her sisters. Since her death in 1973 at 68, the author of The Pursuit of Love, Voltaire in Love, and those infamous reflections ...