Heron Books

The ceilings are so high in the new shop that we may be getting carried away. Our ambition knows fewer and fewer bounds. Now that we have a kettle, we can plot for even grander things. Reading tents, hammocks, champagne fountains. How have I coped for so long without a photograph prop shelf? We have a corkscrew but does the kitchen also need an oyster knife? We vegans wouldn’t want to offend any visiting ostreoideaphiles. Certainly it is only a matter of time before we install a dumb waiter for sending books and snacks between floors. One minute we’re discussing houseplants. The next world domination. For those who are also…

‘… A love poemdoes not love you. Ordoes not necessarily loveyou. A love poem facesoutward. It performslove adequately. Lately,I’ve wondered about poetry’sefficacy. It’s like doubtinga long romance, or romanceitself, the essence of it.Fearsome, to doubtyour life’s foundation.’ Efficacy, utility, value; affinity, love art; Keats, Colette, Nick Cave and PJ Harvey. Diane Seuss may claim doubts but Modern Poetry is a triumphant lesson in the import of poetry, one to convert even the sceptic who has refused to read it since GCSE English forced them to underline a simile without an inkling of why that mattered. Modern Poetry is euphoric. I believe you will fall in love, even with the ghost…

I have read over 5000 books this week. Hang on. I mean: I have read the spines of over 5000 books this week. Most of them, as a result, are in their right place in the new shop. Some of them may take longer to find theirs. I think that I have found mine. We open tomorrow at 9.30 after a week of hard labour alongside family and friends. It is thanks to their support and a lot of pastry from The Mall Deli that we look forward to opening the freshly painted door and showing off Heron Books, Volume II. Yet some have had a cheeky look while we…

I have been accused, not unjustly, of burying the lead in my previous newsletter. In case you missed it, we are moving round the corner to new premises. In case you prefer to take the longer path to prepare for change, alongside a snail and via Dr Seuss, last week’s newsletter can be read here. This weekend is your last chance to visit us in the Clifton Arcade. By next Saturday you will find us at 7a Regent Street. As such, we are offering 10% off everything bought in the shop this weekend – that’s off the prices: you will get 100% of the pages – and we may resemble…

On our last day of secondary school, a teacher read to us Oh, the Places You’ll Go by Dr. Seuss. The teacher in question had never taught me, nor even had reason to tell me off in passing. Yet I remember her as clearly as the Latin teacher for whom I felt a certain love (what rhetorical style; what incredible cheekbones). I recall this teacher’s hair, poker straight and falling forward as she looked down at the page. I can see her stance, her shoulders: that Geography teacher look of someone confident with a clipboard. I can hear the tone of her voice, hear the smile it contained and the…

The Universe in Verse by Maria Popova was born as a ‘festival of wonder’ sharing stories of discoveries in science and illustrative poems. I can be a little sceptical of the word ‘wonder.’ Perhaps I have encountered a few too many pieces in which an overworked management consultant trips over a tree root, gazes up from the forest floor, discovers that there were birds singing while he was worrying about networking and quits his job so that he can share his wonder with the world. After all, no one else can have noticed.* Popova has restored the proper sense of awe and admiration to the word. In her collection of…

‘Allow me to tell you a story’, the pages of Hisham Matar’s novel, My Friends, seem to say, an invocation that becomes more urgent with each chapter. ‘You must let me tell you this story,’ the message becomes. And what am I to do but pass it on? This story of Libya, of three friends in exile, of a specific time and politics which is yet not unique to that time or politics or place. As a child in Benghazi, the narrator recalls watching a journalist on television read a story published abroad in a magazine he cannot name. In it a man is slowly and quietly consumed until only…

‘Food is better in winter if not fresher. You have more of an appetite. Not to mention its warming power. Hot wine with cinnamon at Le Petit Saint Benoit goes right to the bone. So does old-fashioned céleri rémoulade and blanquette de veau. Everything about the creaky bistro, at least the icy day we are there, warms the spirit; from the blood-red sign, to the stubborn old revolving door, to the woman writing down our orders on the paper table cloth.’ David Coggins, his wife Wendy and their children spend the turn of the year in Paris. Where else? Each winter, they return to favourite haunts and find new ones.…

I must have known when I packed eleven books and two editions of the Slightly Foxed quarterly for a couple of days at my parents’ house that I was unlikely to read them all. There should have been an inkling that I might get distracted by the books on their shelves. My idea that I would sit with various nieces and nephews and read their Christmas presents with them was never even verbalised. In reality, I watched Wallace & Gromit, set a record in the great chestnut stuffing consumption challenge of 2024 (partakers: 1, because said partaker ate all of it…) and read some Elizabeth Gaskell, slowly. I’m reading her…

Thank you to everyone who has made this a frenetic, not to say rowdy, week. You know who you are. From the person who asked us to recommend a book for ‘a tricky relative’, who has ‘very different taste from mine’ and who… was also standing in the shop. To the person who hovered in the doorway unsure if it was OK to come in with their vegetables (‘this Brussels sprout stalk is so huge it looks like a lethal weapon.’). To the many people communicating with eyebrows alone that a book must be purchased and wrapped without their companion noticing. To the customer who, I think, confessed to assassinating…