Not long before Nancy Mitford published “The Pursuit of Love” (“Life is sometimes sad and often dull, but there are currants in the cake, and here is one of them”), she worked in a bookshop called Heywood Hill, in the Mayfair neighborhood of London. Her friends—Evelyn Waugh and Patrick Leigh Fermor, among others—would come by and talk to her as she sold books. “I have only ever read one book in my life, and that is White Fang. It’s so frightfully good I’ve never bothered to read another,” she once wrote, describing one of her character’s literary tastes. Later, in an essay, she remarked, “Most people like reading about what they already know—there is even a public for yesterday’s weather.”
The other day, Nicky Dunne, Heywood’s director and executive chairman, was standing outside the shop, near a plaque bearing Mitford’s name and the dates she worked there: 1942-1945. Dunne has tousled Hugh Grant hair, and was dressed in an aqua blazer and a matching knit tie. “I like to think she was sort of honing her writing skills while working in the shop,” he said, of Mitford. He acknowledged another plaque, beneath Mitford’s, declaring Heywood the official booksellers to the Queen. “I feel like we’re part of London’s literary ecology, in a small way. Somebody said that the place is full of ghosts, literary ones.”
Inside, down a narrow flight of stairs, past the shop floor and a rare-books room, which contains such items as Charles Dickens’s hip flask, are the cramped book-lined offices of Heywood’s subscription service, A Year in Books, a kind of bacon-of-the-month club for readers. Each year, the five members of the subscription team read some six hundred books; each month, they send each subscriber a book based on their preferences (of the “yesterday’s weather” variety, or otherwise). Tacked to the wall was a map of the world dotted with pins showing where the books are sent: the U.K., the U.S., Australia, Singapore. “It’s a good visual,” Camille Van de Velde, the head of subscriptions, said. She wore a black sweater and thick round glasses. Her colleagues Faye Keegan (glasses, floral sweater) and Eleanor Franzén (topknot, striped sweater) sat next to her at a row of computers.
Each subscription begins with a reading consultation. “Some people are really prepared and go, ‘I like this and this and this,’ ” Van de Velde said. “Others need a bit more time to get in the groove.” The relationship can quickly turn personal. “I talk to some of mine probably monthly by e-mail,” Franzén said. Keegan picked up a packet from her desk. “One came to see me today, and he brought me this seaweed,” she said. “We’re not selling magic pills,” Franzén added, “but when you get it right for someone it does feel like magic.”
What would they send to a reader recently heartbroken? “Maybe David Nicholls’s ‘Sweet Sorrow’?” Franzén suggested. Or “The Pisces,” by Melissa Broder, Keegan added. How about a woman contemplating motherhood? “Sight,” by Jessie Greengrass, or “Motherhood,” by Sheila Heti. Someone changing careers? “The Outrun,” by Amy Liptrot, or “even ‘Bleaker House,’ ” by Nell Stevens. Someone lonely? “The Lonely City,” by Olivia Laing. “It also makes me think of Ottessa Moshfegh’s ‘My Year of Rest and Relaxation,’ but that’s really leaning into the loneliness,” Keegan said.
Camille Aveni, an executive assistant who lives in Oak Ridge, New Jersey, received a subscription as a birthday gift. “Every time that box shows up with that beautiful blue ribbon and that monthly bookmark, I feel like Anne Bancroft,” in the film “84 Charing Cross Road,” she said. Recently, Aveni, whose tastes skew toward generational novels, received a biography of the war reporter Marie Colvin. “If you had asked me, I would have said no, yet what a brilliant book,” she said. Of her bookseller, she added, “I feel like she knows what I need before I do.”
Ashley Newton, an executive at Universal Music Group, remembered the first time he passed Heywood. “It looked like someone had pressed the Pause button in 1930,” he said. The subscription has turned him on to Kate Atkinson, Anthony Quinn, and Mick Herron.
Mariadela Villegas, a law student, was on Instagram when she saw an ad for a lifetime of books from Heywood. She entered the contest by submitting a paragraph about a favorite book. Since then, she has received books on American diplomacy, a murdered socialite, and a biography of Tsar Nicholas II. “She is so on point,” she said, of her bookseller.
Which book did she pick for the contest? “I wrote about ‘Fahrenheit 451,’ ” she said, for its depiction of a world in which books are banned and only a few people remember them. She said, “I would lie awake at night and think, No more ‘Romeo and Juliet’—imagine that!” ♦
2019-12-02 11:00:38Z
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/12/09/book-of-the-month-club-london-edition
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